Changing the Digital Funding Game
You may have seen Greg Wells' post on how we are changing the Digital Funding Game in NSW. And while these are exciting times, significant planning is required to set up a new governance model for how we will manage our Restart Fund, and for us to understand (at a high level) what we want to deliver with the fund. Greg's post covers the four components of the fund in more detail.
Why do we need a Digital Restart Fund Anyway?
As many agile practitioners know, the biggest inhibitors to widespread digital adoption are the traditional funding and governance processes over projects. In the old world (also known as waterfall delivery), dollars are tied to business cases that clearly outline exactly what will be built, so the finance folks handing out the cash can be confident each project will deliver the promised value back to the business.
The challenge is that this model works for infrastructure initiatives, but it doesn't work for digital investments, where the problem and the solution itself is validated as part of the process via human centred design and iterative delivery. Traditional delivery models don't account for changing requirements, unknowns in technology, or new ideas along the way.
The world has shifted to new (agile) delivery methods. Yet this leaves a big challenge for the finance folks, and in government, that challenge scales with the complexity and size of our programs, leaving the Treasury teams with a big question: How might we enable digital delivery methods across the state while confidently ensuring that each dollar spent will deliver the biggest bang for each citizen 'buck'?
Co-designing with CIOs from across the Sector
While Treasury is on the proverbial digital journey with us, we still need to be clear on how the Digital Restart Fund will be spent and the targeted benefits realised. So, we needed to get clear on our investment priorities - what services are needed across whole of government; we call these core services.
Here's the challenge: We are a big state. And every CIO (Chief Investment Officer) has its own priorities and program of work. How do we get clear on a top priority set of core services to start with in the first year of our Digital Restart Fund?
The good news is, we have a discovery methodology that laid out a plan for us. We started with a set of assumptions we needed to test and a list of stakeholders (all the department CIOs and Treasury) to test with. After 'customer interviews' and co-design sessions, we had an initial list of opportunities that needed prioritisation, which we did by modelling the complexity of implementation and the planned use across government, aligned to the Agency ICT Strategies, and verified with agency input.
The result was a 'short' list of 18 investment opportunities that were deemed to be high priority (with a backlog greater than 40 opportunities varying in size and complexity.)
We also identified the service patterns which were needed to explain what the service was and the concept of how it could be consumed. Some services are easier to implement across all of government (using data and Application Programable Interfaces (API code), and others are not so easy (i.e. shared applications). The CIO's appetite for the former was much higher as it's less disruptive to their businesses.
The Power of Getting Everyone in a Room
Then, like good digital leaders, we ran a workshop - with post-its and sharpies!
It never ceases to amaze us how challenging it can be to facilitate a large group of leaders to a cohesive outcome - the power of getting everyone in a room is immense. The debate around what some core services could become and why we would need them was invaluable to help share perspectives and understand the needs of other agencies.
We had the CIOs prioritise across two sets of criteria - cost to implement versus impact to citizens, and implementation risk versus transformation of the business - to get us to a short list of 10 core and common services we'll continue to explore.
Here's an example of the services in our top 10:
- Giving citizens the option to login to any government website or application via their MyServiceNSW account
- Telling government once - that is, providing citizens the 'opt in' option for their MyServiceNSW user preferences to be securely shared to other government agencies so they don't need to repeat information they have already provided to government.
- Making it easy for agencies to move to cloud services via automation, reducing time and cost to NSW state government agencies
- Consolidation of government payments service, reducing duplication and streamlining payments to and from government
- Enabling agencies to discover, share and reuse API (code), increasing reuse, reducing costs and building a more integrated NSW government.
Where to Next?
While the path forward is becoming clearer, the process is still evolving with more work to do. Enterprise architecture within ICT assurance will continue to lead this forward, working with agencies to co-design each of the top 10 service concepts with the agencies that nominated themselves to help lead the implementation of that service.
The service concepts used in the co-design process will explain everything needed to confirm consumer demand, such as the problems to be solved, the service features and how the service can be consumed. With these service concepts defined, we can verify agency demand and move into portfolio planning for the investment required to commission and onboard agencies.
That's it in a nutshell. In a few short weeks, we'll have a portfolio view of the whole of government services, and we'll be ready for a Digital Restart Fund release and the product teams to go and do their stuff in the coming financial year.
This work is being led by the Enterprise Architecture team within ICT Assurance.