According to the 2022 UN E-Government survey, Denmark, Finland and South Korea scored the highest when it comes to the breadth and quality of digital services they provide.

Despite the challenging macroeconomic conditions that prevailed in 2021, Australia remains one of the top 10 nations globally alongside countries including New Zealand, Sweden and Estonia when it comes to the adoption of digital government services.

The Publicis Sapient Digital Citizen survey on digital government in Australia reiterates this, revealing that 92% of Australians want more digital government services.

The survey found that 83% of Australians were open to digital services that remember details of their past interactions. And 78% of respondents were comfortable with a government website that offered personalised services based on their employment status and income or previous interactions with the government.

The need for a citizen-centric approach

The top-ranked countries for e-government thrive not only for the range of their digital services and infrastructure but how they work to place their citizens and their needs at the very heart of everything they do.

This customer/citizen-centric mindset drives the trust and adoption of these services. Just as achieving a high level of customer experience is key in the commercial sector, it matters equally for the public sector.

Government agencies and departments in Australia are cognisant of this and are continuously seeking ways to address the needs and everyday pain points of their citizens, just like how the most successful and profitable businesses in the world operate.

Customers expect and demand from governments the same as from the businesses they consume products and services from – seamless and personalised experiences. For example, the digital citizen survey identified that “convenience” (62%) and “saves me time” (57%) were the primary drivers for attracting citizens to digital services.

Most citizens are open to many services being made as digitally available as possible, with these ranging from healthcare, the Australian Taxation Office and Centrelink the most common with suggestions for extending digital service offers.

Connecting across government departments

A key aspect of better digital government is improving and streamlining the connections between government agencies and departments.

Many digital government services, including Australia’s, were initially built on top of legacy systems, bringing together different departments and agencies with their own unique systems. This typically results in a less-than-flawless user experience as well as a highly challenging environment for departments to collaborate and work in harmony.

Improving these early platforms requires upgrading both the back-end and the front-end customer experience. In Australia’s case, it has established a Systems Integrator Panel for technical support on the myGov rebuild.

Besides the technical fix, government agencies need to de-silo, unify and collaborate to unify their digital services. As Bill Shorten, Australia’s minister for government services, observed: “While agencies continue to create digital silos, with their own disconnected apps and websites, ordinary Australians will remain rightfully frustrated.”

Listening and continuous improvement

Listening to users is also vital to ensure optimum service delivery.

Australia’s trade simplification reform project is an example of how having the right tools, infrastructure and customer centricity – in this case, for Australian businesses – is paramount in addressing process shortcomings and legacy systems’ pain points. Starting with the “tell us once” principle, the project’s goal is to make it easier and more cost-effective for Australian businesses to conduct the import and export of goods.

The post-COVID-19 and macroeconomic conditions have accelerated the need for simplified bureaucracy. An important factor in materialising that vision is in streamlining how multiple jurisdictions are able to act seamlessly and effectively to cut red tape, boost productivity and save time and money.

The federal government has also been taking feedback from users for its myGov upgrade, commenting: “We have listened closely to our customers to incrementally design and deliver a modern, flexible and personalised platform.”

To build trust and encourage further uptake, three things are important:

1. Using familiar tools

Digital tools help remove communication barriers and foster collaboration across agencies and businesses, as well as set employee expectations in the workplace.

Having the right digital and simple-to-use tools that businesses and users are familiar with and offering elevated digital services in every interaction is key to gaining greater acceptance and adoption.

2. Having top-level security

No technology is entirely flawless when it comes to cyber security. Cyber defences will always be a cat-and-mouse game with criminals. But given the extent of sensitive, identifying data involved in digital government services, there can’t be any compromise when it comes to security policy and investment.

With security top of mind, governments already invest significant time, effort and money in evaluating enterprise tools to ensure that access to them is secure. This includes mandating security protocols such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), secure passwords and even using FIDO2 security keys.

Different government agencies may also use different forms of conditional access policies to limit how, where and from what devices users can access the tools. These tools can provide the required levels of security that enable agencies to ensure that users are able to share documents or connect to other systems only after passing through a security assessment first.

However, the deployment of enterprise-level secure digital tools often requires significant financial investment. It also represents another area of non-alignment that can be problematic when trying to build unified services.

3. Keeping services accessible

The difficult balance with security is ensuring that citizens can still access services without too many barriers.

The Australian government has taken steps to improve this, for example, by offering both a “myCode Gov generator” app for the mandatory two-factor authentication as well as “receive a code by SMS”. There are still some limitations, such as needing an Australian mobile number, which is problematic for Australians living overseas.

I believe we can expect to see Australia making its way into the UN’s top three countries for e-government in the near future, given the increased demand and adoption of digital services. Government digital services are no longer a “nice to have” for Australians but are a requirement as Australians expect and demand access to a range of digital services from their local, state and federal government agencies.

However, being digitally enabled goes beyond having the right tools and platforms in place. It involves the tools working in harmony, a customer-centric mindset and shared objectives for these tools to help governments achieve their goals.

By Carlos Gonzalez,  director of product management at Publicis Sapient

This article was first published by The Mandarin