New Zealand’s privacy law is finally, finally going to get an update. In a year that’s seen a range of big stories on big privacy threats, that’s good news.

There was Cambridge Analytica, who wanted to influence elections, so they built a quiz app that grabbed data from all your Facebook friends. There were local breaches too, through Z Energy’s fuel card website and Vector’s outage app. These are privacy breaches because they put personal information at risk, information like your name or street address which can be collected, accessed or passed on to others when it shouldn’t.

Our privacy law is meant to control how our information is used, and protect us against privacy breaches. It’s the operating system for how organisations get and use our information. And though we’re living in the Internet age, it hasn’t been properly updated since Jurassic Park first hit cinemas.

That’s right. New Zealand’s Privacy Act was written in 1993. Computers ran Windows 3.1, ‘e-mail’ had yet to lose its hyphen, and it was mainly for people working in universities. My mum had a job updating work databases by driving 3.5 inch floppy disks between offices.

The point being, we’ve seen a few changes since then. First, the widespread adoption of dial-up internet. Then, people buying and selling stuff online. And now, smartphones and social media becoming astonishingly ordinary parts of life.

Those changes have posed big challenges for privacy. Despite its age, our Privacy Act has actually stood up pretty well. It established flexible principles for protecting privacy and set up the Privacy Commissioner as a watchdog to hear complaints and keep an eye on things. That’s a good model for a law that adapts as technology changes. But a good operating system still needs updates. We need our parliament to take those updates seriously.

In 2018, protecting our privacy is vital for trust online. Using the internet often means sharing our information. Lots of us have lots of user accounts, including accounts we’ve forgotten about. Facebook. LinkedIn. Neopets. MySpace. The information we put online through these services is valuable, not only to inform and target ad campaigns but also for unauthorised and criminal uses.

Data breaches are a large and increasing threat to our privacy. The MySpace breach in 2014 included about 360 million emails, usernames, and passwords. By 2016, these were being sold on dark web markets as a resource for identity theft and other crimes. Ironic references aside, the rest of us have forgotten MySpace. But it lives on through the sale of breached accounts to target and inform criminal activity.

These privacy harms can have a long shelf-life. In July 2018, people around the world received blackmail emails, saying “I have hacked you, and have webcam footage of you in a compromising position”.  These emails cleverly included, as proof, a real password associated with the target email address. In many cases, a password from the 2012 LinkedIn breach from six years earlier.

Our Jurassic Park-era privacy law fails to provide even basic protections against these harms. An update is long overdue. The Privacy Commissioner first reviewed the law in 1998, the year The Truman Show came out. Then in 2011, the Law Commission reported on its review. That’s the year Thor was released. It’s now been seven years (or three Marvel Movie sequels) since that review. And its recommendations still haven’t been implemented.

After that long, long wait, we finally have a Privacy Bill being considered by Select Committee. For a bill written in 2013, it’s pretty good. It takes some of the obvious steps needed for better privacy protection. For example, it will require organisations to notify users and the Privacy Commissioner about data breaches. It will let the Commissioner issue “compliance notices” to tell organisations what they have to do in response to privacy problems.

At InternetNZ, we’ve joined the 165 other people and organisations submitting on the bill. All the submissions I’ve read support the bill as a path to better privacy protections that work for the next decade. People want better privacy, and organisations want to offer better privacy. Privacy is good for business.

Within that overall support, there are a few things we and others want improved. We think that the way New Zealand does breach notifications should be closer to the model in Australia, and under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). If organisations can align notification practices across countries, they’re more likely to do this well. We think the threshold for breach notifications should be a little bit higher to get this alignment (and to avoid flooding people with too many notifications they can’t act on).

We also want our government to think deeply about the GDPR. One reason is to see if the GDPR has good ideas, which we could adapt to suit our own framework. But the main reason is to keep our stamp of privacy approval. Right now, Europe treats New Zealand privacy law as “adequate”. That means we can export to the EU without every organisation doing its own privacy compliance. That’s a very big deal for New Zealand tech companies and exports via the internet. With a deadline of 2020 to review our privacy, we have to get our thinking caps on now.

The main thing we need is for our politicians to sit up and take notice. Privacy is a human right. Our privacy law is the operating system for how organisations handle our information, and it affects each of us every day.

We’re asking the Justice Select Committee to improve and pass the Privacy Bill. We’re asking them to consider and consult on new changes arising from submissions before reporting back to Parliament. And we’re asking for MPs to think about our privacy more often than Jurassic Park gets a reboot.

This article was originally published here.

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We heard from Kate Russell, hosting the discussion between speakers including Geoff York, Digital Transformation Lead from Sapient Razorfish; Alison Freer, Director at durhamlane, and Alison McKenzie-Folan, Deputy CEO at Wigan Council.

See the full recording here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL-dJIEIRPT5eXo3h4Ia6lWmCQGWpjrsid&v=OzxsLqDSHY8

Alison Freer talks culture change, legacy, digital as a utility and engaging employees:

https://youtu.be/H9dUXveM0LA

Alison McKenzie-Folan says be courageous when it comes to digital transformation:

https://youtu.be/Ci9vdnA_HVg

Geoff York talks culture, change management and putting people at the heart of transformation:

https://youtu.be/rgaDmmXZWAw

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I’m going to cover open data, open government, open source — but only briefly, as you’re already experts! — and how it all ties together into something called “civic tech”.

And how all of these could and can have an immeasurably positive impact on our communities, our whanau, and as a result, ourselves.

Open say what now?

I reckon that strong, shared definitions of any term are amazingly useful when talking about it.

So first up, it’s probably useful to make sure we’re all on the same page with what I mean when I talk about open data.

For the purposes of this talk, we can define open data as any data that’s publicly available, and on an ongoing basis.

And “publicly-available” doesn’t mean for a short period of time only. It doesn’t mean for a select group of people. Or with barriers to entry like being charged to access it.

It means, quite literally, publicly available. To anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Of course, this definition also includes shoddily-made PDFs of council minutes, for example, so the data may be publicly available, but that doesn’t mean it’s hugely accessible, or even terribly useful for many use-cases (not without an amount of resource which acts in itself as a barrier to entry).

And it’s not necessarily live data. To put it another way — it’s static, and while it’s still useful to look for past trends and patterns, it’s not useful for any real-time application. It also, very easily, becomes out of date. And one doesn’t necessarily know when that happens.

One way to counter this, of course, is to make it machine readable. This can be done by the organisation who’s releasing the data, or by members of the public or other organisations. To use our earlier example of Council minutes, someone might take those shoddy (and often rather buried) PDFs and turn attendance records trapped in them into a spreadsheet, for easier analysis.

An even better thing to do would be to also release the data in the form of an API. An open API — that is, one that’s publicly available. With a bit of luck, there’d also be some accompanying documentation about how to use the API, making it nicely accessible, too.

This allows people to analyse and pipe the information into just about any form they choose, from maps to apps. Not only is the data the most up-to-date available, but, as we know, it can be used to make realtime, living resources.

I know the devs I, er, know far prefer an API to being handed an Excel spreadsheet (which may or may not have become corrupted along the line, too).

I hear a lot of puzzlement from people about why on earth one should giveaway data. After all, data leads to information, which leads to knowledge.

And knowledge is power, right?

Open data has huge social value

I’ll answer that question from a lens focussing on open data’s social value. If you’re interested in its commercial value, feel free to contact me afterwards! Because there’s definite commercial value to it, too 

There’s a strong case to be made that data that’s generated by publicly-funded institutions — eg government — should be available to the public who paid for it. Of course, I’m not talking about all data, and certainly not in raw form. We must be very careful around privacy, and not victimising or revictimising people.

But there’s plenty of data that can and should be shared. And a tonne of organisations, and research, backing up that open government data is a powerful thing.

It enables ordinary citizens to understand better what’s going on in their societies, and make more informed choices about the decisions they, and their elected officials, make.

It enables people to push for change — or the status quo — based on evidence, not anecdote, opinion or emotion. Although we know that emotion is hugely important in making decisions.

It builds higher levels of digital literacy — since people need to understand the basics (or know people who do) in order to use the data, they have a stronger incentive to learn about it.

It builds more transparent government and power structures, enabling people to hold their governments to account (sometimes to the horror of said governments, which is great).

And it gets people engaged. Fewer black boxes into which data disappears, never to reappear, means a less cynical and disengaged society. And the more people are engaged in our society, the better. After all, we live in a democracy!

And we get to interrogate our gods.

Talking of which, open government…

Let’s segue into open government, then. I’m not suggesting they’re our gods, but they do have a powerful effect on our lives!

Across the world, more and more governments are turning to the principles of open government as they look for how to stay relevant, do more with less, and be more responsive.

Open govt, as the quotation says, means that people living in a country have the right to access information about what the government is doing — often in the form of open data. Of course, exactly what people can access, and how, differs hugely between countries, but the principles of open government — transparency and accountability, participation and engagement — remain the same.

It’s simple: open governments make for better democracies.

It enables the public to better oversee their government’s activities.

It empowers the people in that country to be more informed, and potentially more engaged.

And it helps push governments to be more accountable, effective and responsive.

One of the major international open government initiatives is the Open Government Partnership, or OGP.

It was founded in 2011, to “provide an international platform for domestic reformers committed to making their governments more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens.” (OGP)

As you see, the OGP people over here have some noble aims:

“New Zealand’s action plan provides opportunities for us to do even better in the areas of:

• improving public service delivery
• increasing the transparency and accountability of government
• encouraging greater public engagement
• fostering new ways for citizens and governments to work together to solve common problems.”

With 7 commitments:

• open budget
• improving official information practices
• improving open data access and principles
• tracking progress and outcomes of open government data release
• ongoing engagement with the OGP
• improving access to legislation
• improving policy practices.

We’re watching closely to see how the involved agencies do — so can you.

This article was originally published here and was reposted with permission.

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In the grander scheme of things, what is our work worth? What is its value to the world? We can attempt to measure costs and perceived benefit to an organisation and to customers. But these kinds of measures are not necessarily appropriate for measuring contribution to a better world, as they look only at economics: costs, savings and profit. What if we could show that our work contributed directly to, for example, a reduction in poverty and to an improvement in social wellbeing? And what if we could also be transparent about the funds spent on initiatives that do not contribute?

I recently attended a conference with The Right Honourable Helen Clark ONZ as keynote speaker. The imperative message from all the speakers was that we should and we must embed a measurement of our contribution into our daily work – that it is urgent now. It was even suggested that competition be introduced by using league tables to show how well (or not) we perform against other regions and countries.

There is already a list of benefits and a framework in place that allow us to do just that. It has been my ambition, for some years, that we use them as a standard during any business case or benefit measuring activity.

The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) define a vision for our world to end poverty, fight inequality and injustice, ensure prosperity for all, and protect our planet. They apply to all development in all nations. It is my belief that the more we focus on the SDGs, the more our work will implement them.

In this post, I am going to look at two of these goals by way of demonstration.

• SDG 3: Good health and well-being
• SDG 11: Sustainable cities and communities

Framework for mapping interactions between SDGs

We also need to look at the interactions between SDGs, within a national context, as they are dependent on each other. Contribution, trade-offs or perverse outcomes between them will need to be scored. Nilsson, Griggs and Visbeck have developed a framework to help us do this. They use measures +1, +2, +3 to indicate that an action or goal is:

• ‘enabling’ creates conditions enabling another goal
• ‘reinforcing’ aiding achievement of another goal
• ‘indivisible’ inextricably linked to achievement of another goal.

Interaction types of -1, -2, -3 rate the negative interactions — ‘constraining’, ‘counteracting’ and ‘cancelling’ respectively, and 0 for no significant positive or negative interactions. An example of a negative policy in New Zealand that might disincentivise students to study for better jobs if they do not qualify for a student living allowance, is that they can receive a job seeker allowance but only when school is not in session. This useful matrix shows the influence scale, other considerations and examples.

Global Compact

My thinking is not new. The UN Global Compact supports government and organisations to do business responsibly by aligning strategies to actions that advance broader societal goals such as the SDGs and its own ten universal principles i.e. by making global goals local.

A New Zealand case study helping victims of crime

My current work in New Zealand, as part of the Result 10 programme, proposes an integrated communications service across the justice sector – integrated from a customer’s perspective. It removes the need for victims of crime to find out what is happening with their case, what will happen next, and what services or advice are available to help them. We already know from extensive research that government makes its customers work too hard, which can aggravate the negative impacts of the whole experience, and so we can and should remove some of that burden. This is just a starting point but during a prototype, victims reported that the service reduced stress and made them feel that their situation mattered. They also said that they would recommend the service to others.

In the diagram below I have combined two methods – cause and effect, and the Nilsson, Griggs’, Visbeck framework. This is a quick incomplete mock-up to demonstrate my technique as a way to start the discussion. If I am correct in my analysis, we see a reinforcing or virtuous loop that, as we decrease stress for victims, we directly improve mental well-being (SDG3). Achieving this goal might be said to create the conditions necessary to enable SDG 11 by way of more resilient communities better equipped to recover quickly and protect themselves from crime. If communities feel safer, then stress is again reduced and so on.

In the next phase we will test anticipated benefits such as improved well-being and mental health after becoming a victim of crime, which in turn may increase resilience and capacity to continue normal working and home lives more quickly after such a disruptive experience — surely an improvement to social outcomes that everyone wants. We might also, traditionally, measure reduction or increase in agency costs associated with call centres answering people’s queries trying to find out what is happening with their case i.e. the cost associated with ‘service failure demand’.

Conclusion

We need to seriously consider how our work in the public sector provides a genuine public service. This means that we need to find a way to model and measure our work — with people and the planet at the centre. More broadly, we need to think and plan for tangible effects; a mentality that insists on a contribution to a better sustainable world.

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The New Zealand public sector has acknowledge this and the need for government to update its approach to reflect the changing needs of citizens. Economic Development Minister Simon Bridges recently said: “The fast-paced iterative model of solving problems fosters exactly the sort of innovation we need to keep our economy growing strongly and put customers at the centre of everything we do”. It is extremely positive that this is a topic of senior public sector leader discussion, however the change needed to enable this within the public sector remains a challenge.

The current system and its problems

Generally speaking, the mechanism for problem solving in the public sector operates under the benefits/risk ‘arms race’ model. Investment in projects is based on which business case has the most assumed benefits and highest risk of no investment to the business. Therefore there is an incentive to group smaller problems together. Most investment decisions will favour these projects, as the scale of the problem infers the scale of risk to the business, thus higher prioritisation. This forms the basis for massive multi-year projects requiring large investment.

However, often we hear stories of projects going over budget and not delivering on the assumed benefits in the public sector. Why? Because the system does not address two modern issues in problem solving:

• It doesn’t account for the shortened time frames for problem solving from changing customer needs in an environment of rapid digital change.
• The increase in complexity of projects when problems are incentivised to be large and complex.

What can we do?

Firstly, problems and benefits are typically based on expert opinion. Performing a problem discovery exercise as a prerequisite for investment provides additional assurances and lowers the risk profile by:

• Providing a secondary data point to validate the expert opinion.
• Providing timely evidence that provides insight and feedback on the changing environment.
• Minimising the investment risk since problem discovery requires small investment, if a valid problem is not found, the sunk cost is limited, the learnings immediate.

Secondly, when projects and problems are combined, the risks and complexity are increased exponentially, not linearly, this is the main reason why projects fail. By breaking down big problems into small manageable parts, it increases the successful delivery of benefits by:

• Reducing the complexity of the problem by significantly reducing the number of dependencies and moving parts in the project.
• Incorporating a rapid feedback loop to improve decision making for later pieces of work.
• Allows flexibility in problem solving, because reducing dependencies allows you to re-evaluate your approach as each part is completed.
• Deliver benefits more quickly, since the timeframes are smaller.

Practicing what is being preached

There is an increasing demand for innovation in the public sector. Traditional approaches to problem solving display some obvious gaps in addressing the modern needs and demands of citizens. The current system is deeply ingrained in the public service and to change this system will involve considerable time and effort. However, to practice what is being preached we need to take on small, manageable parts of this problem, starting with applying the two suggestions of introducing problem discovery into your problem solving process, and breaking problems into manageable chunks.

The post Problem discovery, the overlooked piece of the innovation puzzle in the public sector appeared first on Digital Leaders.

At a recent meeting in London, the Hon. Malcolm Turnbull MP, Prime Minister of Australia, pledged the support of his country to the UK and the broader Commonwealth family during the uncertainty of Brexit and the global market challenges that we face. He called for free trade agreements to be established as soon as practical to ensure the movement of top talent and incentives for investing in building a modern economy for the future are not undermined.

Elizabeth met with Prime Minister Turnbull at a Britain-Australia Society reception in the grand surroundings of Marlborough House, Headquarters of the Commonwealth of Nations. The event was also attended by H.E. The Hon. Alexander Downer AC, Australian High Commissioner to the UK and the Rt Hon. Lord Howell of Guildford, President of the Royal Commonwealth Society.

In echoing the Prime Minister’s comments, Elizabeth said:
“The commitment of the Australian Prime Minister to facilitate free trade and movement of skilled labour as soon as Brexit allows, will be a major boost to the digital economies of the UK and Australia, as both currently face a significant skills shortage and increased global competition. Encouraging greater cooperation and collaboration and sharing experiences and learnings, as a means to building more experienced and mature digital capabilities, is at the fore of the Digital Leaders Network principles.”

Robin Knowles, Founder and CEO of Digital Leaders commented:
“We are very excited by the prospect of a stronger commonwealth for the industry. The Digital Leaders community is already growing across the commonwealth nations with DL New Zealand and DL Malaysia growing steadily and DL Australia hopefully launching in 2018.”

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On Tuesday 20 June we had a webinar presented by Tris Lumley, Director of Innovation & Development, Compliance Director and Andrew Weston, Policy & Development Officer from NPC, discussing ‘Helping young people face complex challenges using technology’. Find the Webinar recording here:

On Tuesday, we also heard David McGlade, the Cyber Security lead at Kainos, present a webinar ‘Are you at risk of a cyber attack?’ He took us through the threats that exist today, their impact on sectors and how you and your organisation can be best prepared to meet the rapid surge in cyber security incidents. Find Kainos’ full webinar recording here:

Are you at risk of a cyber attack? from Kainos on Vimeo.

Then on Tuesday evening, Kate Russell presented her ‘favourite episode’ of DLTV, where she interviewed experts from various sectors, including Jake Kennard, Co-founder of Kets Quantum; Shadi Razak, CTO at CyNation and Bruno Huttner, Quantum Safe Product Manager at ID Quantique. The speakers discussed the current state of quantum technologies, as well as the role of the government in accelerating its commercialisation in an effective and safe manner. Find the episode recording here:

Also on Tuesday AXSChat hosted an event on Inclusive Digital Leaders with Jacqueline de Rojas.  The AXSChat team Neil Milliken, England, Antonio Santos, Ireland and Debra Ruh, Virginia interviewed Jacqueline about Inclusive Digital Leaders and why society functions better when every citizen can participate and contribute in the technology and communications landscape. Find the interview recording here:

The final Webinar on Wednesday 21, was presented by Jane Walshe of Enforcd, joined by Mathias Wegmueller, Co-founder and Head of Business Development, Qumram, and Wendy Jephson, Co-Founder & Chief Behavioral Scientist at Sybenetix. The speakers discussed what RegTech can do, and also possible pitfalls to be avoided in its use. Find the Webinar recording here:

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Delivery is king!

A lot of the discussion kept returning to the idea that delivery is critical for affecting change. A lot of challenges can be overcome by letting the work speak for itself, which means you have to strive for excellent in what you do. We discussed the need to show what good looks like, to change through demonstrating, winning hearts and minds by showing people you are willing to try something new yourself and the need to use transformation to do things better, not just change for changes sake. Sometimes the status quo is just habitual, and it is only by showing a better way that people will understand and be motivated to change. Persistence and resilience in leadership was discussed as critical for longer term change.

Keep it real

Another consistent theme was authenticity and dealing with real people and their real concerns. The idea that you need to be authentic in all you do to build trust and affect change but also needing to always stay connected with how your actions will affect actual people, and the need for believing in your vision (though taking the time to validate it often) and having confidence to drive it forward whilst also respecting those around you. Examples were given of individuals being authentic with the people they work with and how much that was appreciated.

Another example of continual and sometimes repeated consultations without context from which there is no clear outcomes from government was given as a frustration of the public sector in government keeping it real. We discussed how “consultation” in NZ has been clearly defined as meaning there is a chance to change the plan, not just getting feedback or trying to communicate an intent. We discussed the oftentimes gap between intention and action, and how action is ultimately how you judge an organisation or person.

We are stronger together

The need for networks came up repeatedly, whether for support, for learning, for connecting with new ideas, exploring, experimenting, learning different approaches, and celebrating each others successes. My personal favourite was how powerful empathy is as a way to stay real stay connected with the people you are working with and trying to influence, and that cultures are changed through people, not just processes or vision statements. This means sharing stories, seeking context, helping humanise what we do and bring people on the journey. After all, revolutions are bottom up, not top down.

Harnessing the power, energy, experience and expertise of the broader community was discussed as an untapped resource, particularly in the democratic and government context. Finally, we also spoke about self awareness, and the importance of leaders in organisations being willing to change themselves if they want to affect change across their organisations.

Doing means trying

The importance of being willing to try implies being willing to wear some failure in the pursuit of a better outcome. Often failure is seen as a bad thing but failing small and fast gives the opportunity to try things and then find the right path, rather than heavy investment in a path that may turn out to be the wrong path. We spoke about the need to be willing to give things multiple goes to get it right, and the role of entrepreneurship in innovation. We spoke about the need to be comfortable with ambiguity and comfortable to discover new ideas, insights and paths as they arise. One company spoke about the need for them to use fear and reward tactics to get government agencies motivated, raising the question of how you get systemic change in a distributed system.

Do I need permission?

As there were a few public servants in the room, there was some discussion about the authority to do things. We swung back and forth from the idea that to lead you need to be willing to break the rules, to the idea that there needs to be a greater “authorising environment” to empower public servants to innovate. We spoke briefly about the need for a strong public service to innovate for the community it serves and the pressures on it from community, industry and politics. However, the hierarchy of the public service often implies a hierarchy of capability, which can be quite disempowering to many public servants, until you remember it is just an abstract concept that you don’t need to be limited by. We also spoke how actual domain experts in government used to be involved in briefing Ministers however, now there are more layers between the domain knowledge and the decision making.

Transparency

Transparency was raised a few times as both a way to keep it real, to keep people naturally motivated to do the right thing, and how transparency has to go both ways. Not just from government, but also from industry.

Many thanks to all the participants and we look forward to the next NZ DigiLeaders Salon. Thanks to our sponsors Assurity Consulting and Catalyst for their ongoing support.

The post Leading Differently appeared first on Digital Leaders.

I personally think this can come from the ‘tyranny of distance’ mindset and the baggage some New Zealanders still carry about being the small, distant relative to larger economies. Anyway, for whatever reason, we seem to care about this. Last week, we saw that small can be indeed be better and more innovative. Our place as a country of rapid innovation was, I think, clearly validated once again. Let me explain…

As part of the push for better services for New Zealanders, the Dept for Internal Affairs (DIA) recently set up a Service Innovation Lab in Wellington. It’s an experiment in public-private partnership to create a space with coaching that increases the collaboration between multiple government agencies. Each Friday, there is an Open Lab event where visitors can see what the teams are working on and what lessons are being learnt.

At the event on Friday the 9th of May, we had the opportunity in the Open Lab to hear from the National Technology Advisor to the UK Government, Liam Maxwell. Liam is well known in digital transformation circles as one of the leaders that enabled UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) to rebalance the way Government worked with suppliers, got better outcomes and gained significant savings. Liam has also spent time with most of the national jurisdictions that are tackling digital service transformation so he has some great context.

Through the event and in discussions with our visitor from the UK, it was clear that NZ is onto something special. Bringing multiple agencies together to address the needs of citizens for good digital services and, at the same time, joining up government through scalable approaches to data sharing and back-end integration at the same time. A focus on users and their needs as well as the better integration of government to meet those needs efficiently. Very exciting, as well as maybe just a bit “world leading”.

In the case of innovation, scale can be the enemy of pace and indeed throttle innovation itself. Larger public sector systems find it hard to give innovation a clear run. They find it hard to create the space for fresh thinking and allow teams to collaborate well. In New Zealand, we have an exciting degree of scale (our government structures are not simple by any means) and yet we can bring smart people together in a space such as The Lab who really get how to do this stuff to collaborate.

So when it comes to innovation, small is beautiful – provided it’s viable. I think this is especially true when it comes to transforming complex organisations and systems such as government. Provided we set up teams with the right capabilities and allow them enough time to work together on tough problems, then we can maintain a good deal of pace in innovating NZ’s public sector and the economy as a result.

For those of you in Wellington on a Friday, the Lab has an open event at 4pm each week to hear what the teams have learnt or built. They’d be happy to see you there.

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The Lab+ work is being led by the Service Innovation Team in the Department of Internal Affairs (external site link). It is part of the Better Public Services Result 10 agenda (external site link), which is focused on making the digital interactions with government far easier for citizens.

TL;DR — we are experimenting with a new model for government services based on the idea of government information, services and rules being available as APIs (external site link), enabling citizen needs to be served through a diverse ecosystem of public and private sector service providers. In short, “government as a platform”. Follow this blog to stay informed and drop in to our Friday Open Lab meetups to hear more (starting next week!). We will be blogging regularly over the coming 10 weeks and would love to hear your thoughts on our progress.

What does the future of government service delivery look like?

New technologies, methods and business models have emerged in the last decade that governments have, with a few notable exceptions, been slow to adopt. Citizen expectations have changed, as have the ways we want to interact with government, from web to mobile, and augmented reality just around the corner. The technology sector recognised a decade ago the need, value and strategic opportunity in taking a modular, API driven approach to their services, resulting in successful platform strategies from companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and many more.

Where does this leave government? The ability for individual agencies to deliver a comprehensive citizen experience is naturally limited to the scope of individual agency responsibilities (and budgets!). Yet citizens increasingly expect their government experience to be seamless and easy, with the complexity of government hidden away. So how do we genuinely improve the citizen experience, taking these system limitations into account? We believe it is a combination of two key ideas.

Firstly, user-centred design, which is about putting the user at the centre of the design for the service, to better meet their actual needs.

Secondly, a “government as a platform” strategy, which is about using APIs and common capabilities to avoid the historic siloed approach to delivering services while enabling a competitive ecosystem of services and products. We are starting a 10-week project to explore this approach to integrated services.

We have pulled together a specialised and passionate team based in the new Service Innovation Lab, collaborating with private and public sector partners and drawing on previous work and experiences. The plan is to map the user needs, pain points, and the entire suite of information and services, including private and public sector, that new students use when entering or re-entering tertiary education. This will inform the design of a future state prototype for government service delivery as well as deliver the first iteration of the service. This provides both an immediate improvement to the citizen experience and a roadmap for further development.

The future state prototype also becomes a model for all service delivery, so we will test some big ideas including:

• federated services
• making government data, content, transaction services and business rules available as APIs (external site link) for reuse — government as a platform
• verifiable claims – where you don’t need to share personal information to verify that you meet a condition, such as means testing or proof of age
• user consent driven services, automation and actions
• multi-channel service provision by private and public sector.

This blog first appeared here and was reposted with permission.

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