What’s Austrade doing about digital?

Hello! This is a new blog we’ve set up to share what we’re doing at the Australian Trade and Investment Commission to introduce digital ways of working.

If you don’t know us — we’re the agency of the Australian Government that helps Australian businesses export overseas, attracts productive foreign investment into Australia, and supports Australia’s tourism industry. We have staff all over Australia and in over 80 offices around the world, and we work with businesses of all sizes.

When we say “digital”, we don’t just mean technology. We also mean the ways of working that modern technologies make possible.

For example:

• When technology can be changed faster than before, we can start small and experiment based on user needs, then continue to grow and improve our services over time.
• When we can make our content and services available through APIs, we can deliver more services with and through our partners, meaning more businesses can benefit from our expertise without having to come directly to us.
• When we form cross-functional teams to deliver new services, it’s easier to orient our organisation around the business needs and pain points we’re trying to solve.

You can’t solve this problem with technology alone. Our teams need strong user research, design, data and content skills, plus our deep trade and investment expertise.

We’re working hard to make sure our ‘digital’ teams are actually made up of staff from all across our agency, both in Australia and overseas.

Four themes in our alpha digital strategy

We’ve started by setting out a vision for how we’d like to use digital ways of working to change our agency.

(We’ve called it an alpha. This means that it’s the first version and it will change, but it’s not a draft. If you’re in Austrade, or if you work with us, you can align your work to this in the knowledge that this is where we’re going.)

There are four themes:

1. Better services for clients
   We will deliver great digital services for businesses that are quick and easy to use, simplify the end-to-end tasks that you’re trying to get done, and are available in the places where you already go, through the people you already work with.
2. Better tools for our staff
   We will provide tools for our staff that make it easy to find and share information, simplify working and sharing with our partners, and free up our time so we can focus on higher value activities.
3. Increased capability across our teams
   We will develop the digital capabilities of our staff so we can better understand what digital can (and can’t) do, use agile and human-centred practices in our teams, and help us use data in our everyday work.
4. Easier delivery of services
   We will improve our internal processes to make it faster to deliver new services and keep improving our existing services in the future.

We already have a few initiatives in progress that fit these themes, like prototyping new services and rolling out Office 365 to our staff. We’re now looking at the extra things we need to start doing to meet this vision.

Measuring how well we’re doing

It’s hard to iterate if you can’t tell if things are getting better or worse. We’ve chosen a starting set of indicators to help us assess our progress for businesses and our staff.

For the businesses we work with, our metrics are:

• Increased levels of user satisfaction
• Increased time saved
• Increased digital take-up, where online and offline services co-exist
• More services meeting the Digital Service Standard

For our staff, we’re measuring:

• Shorter time to complete common day-to-day tasks
• Increased digital capability in our workforce (eg. as a greater proportion of staff who work directly with data)
• Faster time to the delivery and iteration of our services
• Improved quality of client data across our systems

What’s next?

Since the start of the year, we’ve been talking to our staff across the world about our digital approach, to test if it makes sense. Our strategy will continue to evolve as we find out what works, and what doesn’t.

We’ve also started work on new digital services: our first is an online tool that will make it easier for exporters to find relevant information to help make an export decision. (We’ll blog more about this soon.)

We’re also really interested in exploring digital partnerships — how can the many organisations in the trade and investment ecosystem collectively provide offerings that help exporters and investors?

Working in the open

We’re blogging about this because sharing our thinking early for feedback gives us a better chance of getting it right.

Whether you’re a business, a trade association, an education organisation or a government agency, tell us where this joins up with what you’re doing, tell us where we can do better, and tell us your ideas on where Austrade can add value to your work. You can drop me an email at jordan.hatch@austrade.gov.au.

We will be sharing more soon on our progress. Subscribe to our Medium blog or follow our LinkedIn page for updates.

Jordan Hatch is the Deputy Chief Digital Officer at the Australian Trade and Investment Commission.