No buzzwords, just practice
Code for Australia’s quest to measure digital maturity
Our cities are afflicted by problems that people experience in their daily lives: clean air in congested cities, a healthy and independent life in old age and access to digital technologies that improve public services.
To address these problems public, private and community organisations have embarked on using innovation and transformation to produce a more caring society, build cities that are more enjoyable to live in and run services that reach and service everyone who needs them. These approaches “to innovate” and “digitally transform” have differed substantially, probably even more than the weather forecast on Port Phillip Bay; and equally, they’ve had mixed results.
The main issue with the different approaches taken by organisations and countries have relied on the clarity of their purpose, the approach taken, and the products, processes and programs they built. In Estonia, the government has directed all their work towards creating an e-state with automatic e-services available 24/7.
In the US, we’ve seen not only the creation of the US Digital Service, but also 18F, a government to government digital consultancy and a reframing of the US Presidential Innovation Fellows. In Mexico City, which is almost as big as the population of Australia, the municipal government established a lab to be able to do projects and processes that would have been impossible within the current government processes.
Trying to make progress in a completely new space is hard when units can’t define where they are relative to the progress that has been made elsewhere.
- David Eaves, Program Director Harvard Kennedy School of Government
The good news is that now that those pioneering organisations and well established departments and offices have been in existence for a while, we can learn from them; from real practice-based approaches that national, state and local governments have embarked on. No longer do we need to rely on mythical hypothesis from consultants or imported practices from the private sector; lessons from practitioners have now been identified, packaged and made into a model from one of the most intimidating research groups around the globe — the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. See story below.
To bring these lessons to Australia, we’ve decided to use Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s framework to measure organisation’s digital maturity and help them identify areas they can improve on. We truly believe Harvard’s research represents a solid representation of what is needed to transform organisations; from culture to legislation and off course technology.
We’ll be running this assessment across local, state and federal governments with the ambition to create an annual Digital Maturity Report of Australia; celebrating and highlighting the wins, recognising the areas where we need to collaborate and creating roadmaps for success and great service delivery.
Practice-based Digital Transformation is far from being a step into the unknown. There is substantial experience accumulated over many decades of successful practice which we can learn from to foster a more coherent and cohesive framework across government organisations and nations. By harnessing and directing the power of academic research, digital maturity not only stimulates economic activity and growth — it can also help address the wicked problems of our time.
If you want to more find out more — this should have some answers for you.
