Before he resigned in frustration (and, sadly, soon thereafter died) erstwhile Commonwealth Chief Technology Officer Paul Shetler nailed it e.g.
here. Some highlights:
“Nobody wants to engage with government. Nobody cares about the DTO, ATO, DHS, DSS — the whole alphabet soup — nobody cares about any of that. Nobody really wants to engage with it, because people just want to get stuff done.”
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The former DTA chief refrained from rattling off a list of high-profile tech wrecks or even comparing the extremely long wait times for Centrelink call centres with the notoriously meaningless average figures often trotted out by the Minister for Human Services and the department’s senior executives in denial of an obvious problem.
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Government is not simple, and making it more so is a radical reform task — not just an exercise in making better websites and online services to replace paper forms.
First up, Shetler named the old “iron law of bureaucracy” that says big organisations tend to work towards maintaining, expanding and replicating themselves at least as much as their actual core purposes.
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Shetler also urged government leaders to “work with human nature” in the sense that the tribal, competitive nature of public services can be turned to support transformation.
“There’s a lot of talk about collaboration. Kumbaya. All very important. But also, keep in mind that when you’re dealing with the highest levels of the public service, the SES, you’re dealing with highly competitive individuals,” he said.
“Make that competition work for us. … In the UK they had a group in the civil service, they were the directors-general, they were next in line to become the permanent secretaries; they were called digital leaders.
“And the message was given out very clearly from Francis that if you want to become the next perm-sec, you’re going to do some great stuff for your department in digital. So they competed with each other. This was not about collaboration, this was about Darwinian competition.
“You need to know how to use both. And just understand that people are driven by fear and greed as well as more altruistic motives, and we need to use all of them to make the change you want to get to.”