Cutting costs can rebuild confidence in government

If local governments could get members of the community happily utilising digital services and relying less on direct interaction with staff, there are opportunities for quick savings.

Local governments will serve their residents better if they improve their digital services, says TechnologyOne CEO Ed Chung

Earlier this year, I hosted a roundtable that included some of Australia’s most experienced and distinguished policymakers and thinkers, including former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and former cabinet minister Craig Emerson.

TechnologyOne pulled together the exercise to ensure we are investing to solve the most important problems facing the communities we serve.

The hot topic that kept coming up again and again was the deep social and political divisions in the US and how they were shaking up the world, and the importance of Australia avoiding the same fate.

The consensus was that deep inequality in many parts of the US had caused such a loss of faith in governments at all levels in the US that it had laid the groundwork for division, radicalism and a drift towards a more violent society.

The other great theme that emerged in the discussion was the new wave of changes hitting us as AI moves from hype to ubiquitous – albeit often invisible – in our lives.

These themes struck home for me when I read the findings of a landmark study TechnologyOne commissioned this year into Australian citizens’ experience of digital services from Australian federal, state and local governments.

The study draws on the responses of almost 2600 Australians to a range of detailed questions about how they used digital services from their governments, whether those services were meeting their expectations and, importantly, how they felt about the experience.

The report is full of rich data and is something of a curate’s egg of good and bad news for all tiers of government.

The federal government is doing well at encouraging the use of digital services, with 88.3 per cent of people saying they had used online federal services, and 42.6 per cent saying the services had improved in the past four years.

At the other end of the spectrum, only 55.4 per cent of people said they had used digital services from their local government and fewer than 30 per cent said the services were getting better.

The headline finding, though, was that those people who could gain most from the effective delivery of digital services – those in the most challenging economic circumstances – were the most likely to find the experience of using them unsatisfactory.

This was true of federal, state and local governments.

Again, local government received the poorest rating.

The local government community does not deserve to be beaten up on the basis of this comparison – they have access to a pittance compared to the IT funds available to the federal government, after all.

However, there are very good reasons for all tiers of government to work together to quickly turn this around.

First, with budgets under increasing pressure, there are very large cost savings being left on the table. In fact, from a pure efficiency point of view, if local governments could get these members of the community happily utilising digital services and relying less on direct interaction with staff, there are opportunities for quick savings.

The barrier these citizens are encountering in using digital services are not because they lack last mile access technologies. The NBN and ubiquitous smart phones have put these services within reach of almost everyone. Rather, they struggle because the process or the instructions are not clear to them.

Something as simple as better targeted and clearer language, upfront instructions and user interfaces that are up-to-date and integrated to the core systems can transform the user experience.

Too often, though, I see end-user service delivery technology being built stand-alone, in expensive projects that, once deployed, required significant additional investment to change.

I suspect this may be part of the problem for local governments trying to roll out digital services – something as simple as a language change can be an IT project. Or, if there are process or policy changes back in the core system, they do not flow automatically through to the customer interface.

Customer service needs to be quick to stand up and quick to tear down, adjust, and put back online. They need to be natively connected to core systems so they are never out-of-date.

The rewards could be massive – as the report says, this a rare opportunity to deliver social good while making operational savings.

But the cost of not getting this right needs to be factored in, too.

We need only look at the US to see what can happen when a community loses its faith in the institutions of government.

Ed Chung is chief executive, TechnologyOne.