Fresh push to modernise government services ‘a good start’

Sunday, 23 February 2025

The public service is due to deliver dozens of significant digital initiatives over next couple of years, even as it labours under the impact of ongoing funding cuts.

Internal Affairs chief executive Paul James, who also serves as the Government’s chief digital officer, estimates the cost of the work in train at several hundred million dollars.

There is nothing particularly unusual about the volume of activity and the new initiatives account for only a small part of the $12 billion that 50 agencies will spend on IT over four years, James says.

But a stock-take of the modernisation initiatives that Internal Affairs produced in December, when put together into a single list at least, looks fairly substantial.

Sigurd Magnusson, chief executive of Wellington open source software company Silverstripe and a senior figure in the industry, describes the work programme as a good start.

But he says a lot more will be need to be done if New Zealand is to catch up with “digital leaders” such the UK, Singapore and New South Wales in Australia.

“It's not so much that we've fallen behind. Others have made great progress and we've not been doing that.”

What will I be able to do differently?

The most popular services provided by the Government such as applying for and renewing passports, car registrations and filing tax returns have already gone online.

It is mostly less common tasks that are next off the rank in the digital roadmap.

A “digital employment service” being developed by the Social Development Ministry as part of the $183 million first stage of its Te Pae Tawhiti transformation programme should give beneficiaries access to vacancies posted for them by employers by the end of the year, for example.

The goal is that jobseekers will be notified of suitable jobs and able to apply for opportunities and check on the status of their applications online, and will be able to generate a CV themselves using information already in their profile.

The Education Ministry is building a digital service that should make it easier for schools and parents to access learning support services.

But, mostly, there are a raft of changes under way, some quite deep under the bonnet, that promise to make access to government information and services — and just as importantly their delivery — more efficient.

Internal Affairs itself has been working with Amazon Web Services to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that could help people find information that may be spread across government websites simply by asking a question.

That would be rather than having to work out where to look and click through numerous menus for answers.

An example of a question the AI tool could help answer might be “what is the fastest route to New Zealand citizenship?”, James says.

In another application of AI, ACC has been exploring using a tool that automatically creates a summary of each conversation that its contact centre staff have with clients.

“The first thing they do when they get off call, is finish typing up the notes to keep a record of the call.”

But the AI tool is designed to short-circuit that, James says, “so they are back on to the next call much faster”.

The services modernisation roadmap envisages ACC would share its approach with other agencies.

ACC spokesperson Natala Faith says it expects to pilot the AI tool, Genesys Co-pilot, next month, after it has completed a privacy and security assessment.

“ACC has not developed the tool from scratch; it’s capability available within the Genesys Cloud platform. However, ACC will be required to ‘tune’ the tools dictionary so that it understands ACC-specific terminology.”

The Government wants to make an “identity check” service that will let people prove who are they are online using the camera on their phone or computer widely available across agencies by the end of the year.

Unlike the RealMe digital identity service, it will be designed for one-off checks rather than creating a lasting credential, James says.

“It means people don't have to go up to a counter to prove who they are; they can do that on their phone.

“The Ministry of Social Development is using it and that has saved them million of dollars, but we’d like to see that rolled out across the public sector as it could really change accessibility to services through the digital channel.”

James likens picking favourites among projects on the roadmap to “saying which one of my children I love the most”.

But one highlight is an initiative under way at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to help government agencies use a tool called FormBuilder to quickly create online forms, he says.

“We've mandated that agencies have to use that if they are going to construct a form for businesses so there's more consistency, more commonality, and they are easier for businesses to populate.

“It’s a ‘little thing’, but for a businesses that's meaningful in terms of compliance.”

How is the work progressing?

Three-quarters of the projects are on time, 20% have had a few issues that are being managed, and only two are “challenged”, James says.

“Across a portfolio like this. You'd expect a couple to have hit roadblocks.”

But those two projects are important ones.

One is a Justice Ministry project to make it easier for people to participate in court hearings remotely, rather in person, he says.

“They have got some vendor issues they are working through.”

Another is a Health NZ scheme to let people securely access their health information online from anywhere.

Much of the work on the roadmap lends itself to the use of contractors who might be with an agency for a few months up to a couple of years.

The word around the traps in Wellington is that the phones of well-regarded contractors are starting to ring again, after a period when the market for their services was dead.

“A couple of years ago, we were seeing real concern about how hot the contractor market was. There were just massive inflationary pressures,” James says.

“That's all gone and what we're hearing now is agencies are getting what they consider to be good value for money.”

How does NZ compare?

Magnusson believes the digital grass is greener in New South Wales.

There, 92% of driver’s[ licence holders keep their licence in digital form on their phone and can use that as a form as of ID in bars and restaurants, he says.

“That’s just one example, but there's all that progress that has been happening elsewhere.”

New Zealand’s last big effort to modernise government services occurred in about 2010 when there was a push to organise their delivery around major life events such giving birth or starting work, he notes.

The idea then was that people should be able to access all the services they needed at such times from one place, Magnusson recalls.

“We had a big roadmap for government which revolved around trying to make services more ‘citizen-centric’, rather than being departmentally siloed.”

The idea was you might need six different government agencies to collaborate, but you’d just fill in the form and that would all be sorted out behind the scenes.

There were some “nice improvements” such as being able to apply for an Inland Revenue number when registering a child’s birth.

But, overall, the vision wasn’t delivered on, Magnusson says.

James says the snag the approach ran into was that all the services grouped around a life event needed to be digitised before they could be aggregated.

“As we started to look at what the next cab off the rank should be, we started to hit real barriers quite quickly.”

But identifying a new “life event service” to digitise is now back as part of the roadmap.

“We're now at a point where we can look around to see what’s next.”

One silver lining if New Zealand has fallen a bit behind the digital leaders is that it can be cheaper to catch up than to pioneer.

That is especially if services have been developed overseas using open source software, as has often been the case in the UK, Magnusson says.

“We're not the only country with health records or driver's licences or public consultations, right? We don't have to create our own special snowflake.

“We can deliver really well-tested solutions from around the world, or locally developed, and in the next five years get New Zealand to a point where we're operating a ‘21st century government’ where people can just grab their phone and do what they need to do.”

One way or another, value-for-money is clearly going to be at the heart of every conversation about any new digital initiative for the foreseeable future.

“The public service has gone digital in quite a big way, but has really been agency-centric,” James says.

“The ambition here is to create a platform to pull things together a bit more and get better value.”