Innovation and collaboration

To advance and excel as a public service, Government should always develop new ideas, methods and processes as part of business as usual. Government can collaborate more with industry and academia, and the public, to better understand and help solve its problems.

Stakeholders noted the need for government to collaborate with the public and users of its services. They reiterated the importance of designing for and with users of government services. These users include multicultural communities, young people, people with disability, mature-aged and senior citizens, and LGBTQIA+ communities.

What we heard

Stakeholders identified a range of barriers that may prevent us from adopting AI technologies. The key messages we heard were:

Experts outside government are focused on understanding what Government's needs and priorities are

Stakeholders expressed a strong willingness to leverage their considerable technology expertise to listen to and understand government challenges, and work with government to solve them. Government needs external expertise to innovate and solve 'wicked' problems. Government needs to facilitate this collaboration.

Insights from stakeholders within government focused on how we can create a discipline of testing and failing fast and how we can share data to work together to create better services

Government should start small, test continuously and scale to ensure services are meeting user needs. Government should also work to share more data with industry and academia to generate innovative ideas and create better services.

Insights from community organisations stressed the need to collaborate, test, and co-design with the community

Stakeholders reiterated the importance of testing with and designing for users. Communities are the recipients of the services we design. If we do not design and test ideas with them, we run the risk of designing services that out of step with community expectations.

Actions

The NSW Government will focus on AI innovation and collaboration through the following actions: