Delivering digital for the user, not government

Everyone wants their experiences of services to be useful, easy and consistent and government is no different. But often, their time on government websites gets complicated and frustrating. That’s because like many large complex organisations, government has been delivering information online for a long time, using a number of different approaches.

In Victoria, change is happening. Users are now at the heart of digital design and delivery and there are a number of groups within government who are driving to deliver better digital experiences.

Digital Engagement (DE) is part of the Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC) in Victoria. We are helping to set and deliver the new vision for how government delivers digital.

We believe that digital is making the world more connected; making it easier for us all to find information we need and engage with our communities. Within DE our goal is to deliver on that potential for the Victorian Government.

Our vision

It’s true, our vision for digital means we’ve got a big agenda.

We are changing how the Victorian Government talks to and interacts with the community online.

Along the way, we’re shaking up how it designs and delivers services, with a healthy dose of playing with tech to innovate for citizens.

We’re using technology as an enabler to help citizens find and act on government information. We’re also building and connecting products to help our colleagues meet their business objectives.

Team structure to support delivery

We are a small cross-functional product-based team. This structure allows us to deploy skill sets across each of our projects and products.

We develop pilot projects and maintain digital products for use across government. We also support access to open data and manage information services.

5 ways of working

Whatever we build, I encourage the team to:

1. have a evidence base for it

2. make it reusable

3. make it open source as much as we can

4. collaborate widely

5. push as far as we can

Our vision means we’re busy

There’s so much we want to tell you about what we’re doing. Over the next little while the team will come back and share their stories in more detail. For now, I’ll leave you with this snapshot of our work:

Application programming interface (API) Gateway

Creating reusable and programmatic access to government data and services will help the government to better design policy and deliver services.

The API team is building a gateway to share information across government systems. Their focus is on internal information sharing use cases such as Family Safety Central Information Point as well as sharing externally through open data.

The API gateway will help to:

· increase public participation

· support evidence-based policy development, and

· enable data-driven collaboration between civic and economic sectors.

Open Data

www.data.vic.gov.au is the place to discover and access thousands of Victorian Government open datasets.

All sorts of professionals, academic researchers and citizens go there to find information that helps them build apps and develop data visualisation tools.

Our open data portal can be used for research into complex areas like health care, crime and transport. It’s also an essential part of how the government engages with civic technology enthusiasts and the developer community at events like GovHack.

The Open Data team is also creating a whole of Victorian Government (WoVG) asset register. This will make it easier for government agencies to discover and share data. This is a big step towards achieving data-driven policy making.

Digital Insights

This team is using analytics to make sure we get the most out of every digital interaction. They help clients use analytics to develop policy, service design and communication strategies.

Right now, the team is also working on a WoVG analytics approach that will improve website activity and performance reporting.

Engage Victoria

Engage Victoria is an online consultation platform that helps Victorian communities share their ideas and take part in government decision making processes. Before we launched Engage Vic, our approach to public engagement was pretty fragmented.

Since launch, Engage Victoria has hosted more than 150 consultations that have received more than 40,000 citizen contributions.

Engage Victoria was recently recognised as a “highly commendable finalist” at the global 2018 GovCX Awards. Created by the Boston Consulting Group, the awards identify and celebrate best practice digital government services around the world. The submissions were judged on intuitiveness, information and search quality, visual and emotional appeal, and level of innovation and creativity of the digital service.

The Engage Victoria team have also recently launched Pick My Project, which is a state wide participatory budgeting trial, which we will write about in the near future.

Service Design

The Service Design team works with clients across government to understand and test how human centred design approaches can improve user experiences of government policy, products and service delivery.

The team helps clients solve complex problems by applying design tools and qualitative research methods to widen perspectives, build relationships for collaboration and collect a rich human centred evidence base to inform decision making.

They ease the design process and help teams apply design thinking to problem definition, analyse their data and prototype and test possible solutions.

Single Digital Presence

Single Digital Presence is both a project and a product suite.

The project will address how the Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC) audience across more than 50 websites and user experiences are inconsistent. That’s because, until now, websites were designed for government rather than user outcomes.

SDP will put DPC’s websites onto one shared platform to create technical consistency and ease of management.

It will also apply a user first approach that introduces a common user experience. This will make it easier for people to find, understand and use information from the Victorian Government.

At its heart, SDP is about creating a digital environment that moves users from need to outcome quickly and seamlessly.

As a project, SDP provides a test case for broader website consolidation across government.

Beyond what we’re delivering for DPC, SDP also provides a model and a technical approach for other agencies who want to leverage what we’re building. This offers a lot of benefits, including supporting government agencies to:

- Get more done for less

- Spend money on innovation instead of duplication

- Increases collaboration across agencies and beyond

- Take advantage of continuous improvement

- Write once, share everywhere

- SDP is also easy to use and administer and offers enhanced security.

We’ve got 2 major deliveries happening in the next month and we’ll post again soon to share the journey.