The South Australian government has released an ICT strategy document that sets out its goal to put more government services online and become “digital by default”.
<i>SA Connected</i> includes six focus areas: serving people, securing resilience, improving delivery, working together and innovating now.
“The evidence is clear, our customers prefer online services and increasingly mobile-ready services,” read the report.
“This does not mean that services will only be provided in a digital format. The focus will be on providing the best range of services to our customers – giving them choice.”
For example, the SA government wants to have multiple service channels where citizens have the choice of dealing with an agency in person or online.
“Face-to-face transactions may well be many times more expensive than digitally-delivered services but to ensure that our customer relationships remain strong, we will understand our customers and our services holistically,” read the report.
Premier Jay Weatherill said some customer service changes have already been completed including a rebuilt sa.gov.au website where citizens and businesses can find SA government information, conduct transactions and access government services. In addition, the notice of vacancies website has been upgraded to allow “instant publication” of vacancies.
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ICT projects
Turning to improving delivery, the SA Connected report said that there will be no more big ICT projects. Instead, large projects will be broken down into smaller segments with “well-defined” exit strategies to ensure the government is not locked into spending more time and money on projects that aren’t working.
In addition, executives will be held to account for ICT project successes and failures.
“Project documentation will clearly define who is responsible for getting the project done and who is ultimately accountable for the success or failure of a project. This is communicated to, and agreed to by, all involved,” read the documents.
As part of the working together focus, the SA government wants to have multi-agency approaches rather than agencies going alone.
“We will put in place across-government support to make it easier for agencies to work together. Central agencies and expert groups will provide leadership to co-ordinate agencies.”
Open data
According to the report, the SA government is moving to an open data approach where state government agencies will make more data available to the public.
“We know that it is much easier to release data when the decision to do so is made up front, before the data is collected. We will put in place across-government support to make it easier for agencies to classify, license and release data in sustainable ways.”
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