Smartial Wayback Machine Text Extractor

Live version of this page exists.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211028172425/https://webdirections.org/blog/transform-16-better-public-services-for-new-zealand-darryl-carpenter/

This article contains 9 images. You will find them at the very end of the article.

This article contains 718 words.

Transform 16: Better Public Services for New Zealand - Darryl Carpenter - Web Directions

Transform 16: Better Public Services for New Zealand – Darryl Carpenter

John Allsopp

13th March, 2017

@johnallsopp

As we get closer to Transform 17, one of the things we can say we were especially pleased about with our first Transform conference in Canberra last year was the variety of perspectives presented. We had speakers from the USA, the UK, Australia national, New South Wales, South Australia, Northern Territory – and our close international neighbour New Zealand.

Darryl Carpenter from the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs’ Better Public Services Programme gave an overview of how the NZ digital transformation was proceeding, with some significant points of similarity and difference to approaches used in Australia and elsewhere.

Better Public Services for New Zealand

Darryl Carpenter: DIA, NZ

Key points

The New Zealand government committed to a program called Better Public Services that included meeting 10 specific targets across five result areas.

Result 10, in the area of “Improving interaction with government”, is “New Zealanders can complete their transactions with government easily in a digital environment”.

In addition, the government also committed to a large scale ICT review, providing the opportunity to take advantage of new technologies.

The ICT Review in turn brought together all the top departmental and agency executives, who could then also consider the BPS objectives in context.

The stability of a long term federal government was important in undertaking transformation.

“Life is about events in people’s lives, not the agencies they interact with.”

Takeways

The number of government agencies with which people have to interact causes great frustration.

That frustration is worsened when people’s information changes, as it does through life, and they have to repeat the changed information to every agency with which they deal.

A centrally led but collaboratively delivered approach may or may not be better than a centrally led, centrally delivered approach to transformation.

In the rush to be agile, attention should be paid to the structure and formalisation that goes with being a government agency.

He aha te mea nui, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata (Maori for “And the most important thing is the people, the people, the people”).

“Surround yourself with brilliance, and get out of the way.”

Caveats

Political will was required to make this want to happen, and cross-agency support was needed to implement it.

The challenge remains to broaden the scope of Result 10.

Government leaders and managers may drive a transformation process that changes their own jobs, and that can be a challenge.

Funding remains an issue.

Resources

website

slides

Tweets

Great reading, every weekend.

We round up the best writing about the web and send it your way each Friday morning.

delivering year round learning for front end and full stack professionals

Learn more about us

I have yet to have an end-to-end conference experience that was as professional as what was provided by Web Directions

Joe Toscano Founder, designgood.tech

Each year we have 6 unique online conferences for front end developers, plus Remixed, a free event that brings together some of the highlights from the previous year.

accessibility engineering for front end developers