Platform+Agile Experiences from the Front Lines of Public Sector Reform
Dr Steve Hodgkinson
Digital Transformer | Australian CIO50 Hall of Fame | IPAA Victoria Fellow | GAICD | DPhil (Oxon)
The Digital Transformation Approach of the Department of Health and Human Services, Melbourne Australia.
steve.hodgkinson@dhhs.vic.gov.au (updated June 2020)
Abstract
The Department of Health and Human Services reports its experience with implementation of a Platform+Agile approach to digital transformation projects. Project delivery cadence has been increased, delivering more new systems, while costs and risks have been reduced. The Platform+Agile approach applies the Cynefin framework to boost achievement of innovation objectives and improve the reliability of technology project delivery. This has empowered in-house teams to accelerate digital transformation by leveraging public cloud service platforms, agile mindsets, devops methods and nimble procurement arrangements. More than 50 new business applications have been successfully delivered, enabling the implementation of high priority policy and service delivery reforms and transforming the digital service experience of the department’s clients, patients and staff.
1. Context
1.1 Department of Health and Human Services
The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is one of the largest departments of the Victorian state government in Melbourne Australia. The department’s 11,500+ staff perform a wide range of policy, funding and service delivery responsibilities including:
1.2 The IT team
The Business Technology and Information Management (BTIM) branch is the department's central IT group - part of the Corporate Services division. Several hundred public servant and contract staff are responsible for IT strategy & planning, enterprise data, infrastructure and application architecture, departmental cyber security and the delivery of an annual IT project portfolio of around $80-100 million.
The BTIM executive team comprises:
Cenitex, the Victorian Government's shared ICT services provider also provides operational support services - under the leadership of CEO Frances Cawthra.
In Victoria the health sector is decentralised. The department's Chief Digital Health Officer, Neville Board, leads digital health strategy and policy across the sector, but around 80 individual health services (hospitals and community health providers) are responsible for their own IT, with some clinical records, patient administration and finance applications provided on a shared services basis by the department's Health Technology Solutions unit.
1.3 The Author
Who wrote this article? Dr Steve Hodgkinson has been the CIO of the department and Director of the BTIM branch since December 2014.
Steve has uniquely ranked in the top 10 of Australia's CIO50 list for four consecutive years and had projects in the finals of the ITNews Benchmark Awards for four consecutive years, is a Fellow of the Institute of Public Administrators of Australia (Victoria) and was recognized as Australian State and Local Government CIO of the Year in 2017. He is also committed to promoting diversity in the public sector workforce - creating an award winning program to create opportunities for people with autism which won the 2018 Australian TechDiversity Awards.
He previously worked as Director eGovernment Strategy & Policy for the Victorian State government in Melbourne prior to an eight-year stint as global Chief Analyst Public Sector for the UK research and advisory firm Ovum.
In earlier times he founded and sold an e-commerce company, movinghome.com.au, and worked in a range of executive and consulting roles in the government and utility sectors in the UK and Australasia.
He has a doctorate in Management Studies from Templeton College at the University of Oxford and a first-class honors degree in Commerce from the University of Otago in New Zealand.
2. The Problem
In late 2014 the department’s IT capabilities were at a low ebb. Infrastructure was under-invested and out of date (for example, the department was still running Microsoft Windows XP and Server 2003 throughout its infrastructure). Few new business systems were being delivered and the IT project budget was insufficient to make inroads into a significant infrastructure and application project backlog. Systems were outdated and insecure. Projects were failing. Executives were frustrated with IT. Things needed to change!
The IT team, however, was enthusiastic about finding ways to better leverage modern public cloud service platforms and more flexible ways of thinking and of delivering projects. It was recognized that both new tools (platforms) and new (agile) ways of working were required … so a new approach was developed and referred to as “Platform+Agile”.
Two early project successes shaped the team’s understanding of what could be achieved with more modern tools and some fresh thinking.
The first was an online system to improve the process of applying for social housing. The existing process was via a complicated paper form requiring extensive face-to-face interactions – an inconvenient and inefficient process for both clients and staff. A new system was developed by the in-house team in Microsoft .NET on Microsoft Azure and made available on the Commonwealth my.Gov citizen services portal. The project was delivered in a timely manner, leveraging an existing enterprise agreement with Microsoft and using an iterative agile delivery approach that streamlined the application process. It also leveraged the Azure platform’s native ability to support secure access to the application from any mobile device (which was previously regarded as impractical due to the complicated application form and the additional cost of app development). The new online housing application won industry awards and received praise from customers ... most of whom made their applications from a smartphone or tablet.
The second early success was a project called the L17 Family Violence Referral Portal. This project built a new system in just nine months to automate previously faxed referrals from Victoria Police to over 50 human services sector agencies. The portal provided a secure means to triage L17 family violence reports from police and allocate them to agencies for client visits and case management. This created, for the first time, the ability to track referrals, report outcomes and create a feedback loop back to Victoria Police. This was another ‘surprising’ success given that there had been numerous failed attempts at this project over the previous decade. This project launched the viability of the Platform+Agile approach as a new and better way to empower in-house teams to tackle complex multi-agency information sharing projects with sensitive client data.
The Platform+Agile approach evolved project-by-project over several years to strengthen the methods and techniques. This has re-empowered in-house teams, demonstrably boosted innovation, increased the cadence of project delivery, reduced costs and risks and increased staff engagement and motivation.
3. Cynefin Foundations
A foundational culture change idea behind the Platform+Agile approach was acknowledgement of the interplay between the complexity of the department’s reform challenges and the agility possible using knowledgeable in-house staff.
Most policy and service delivery reforms in the health and human services sectors involve solving complex problems (in terms of the Cynefin Framework developed and popularised by Dave Snowdon's Cognitive Edge team). Complex problems comprise loosely coupled variables and uncertain cause-effect relationships. Solutions to complex problems emerge through a process of probing, sensing and responding. This requires a qualitative understanding of both the problems and the possible solutions - and a flexible, outcomes oriented, mindset.
Our observation in DHHS was that people with deep organizational and subject-matter knowledge, contextual insights and relationships are often better at understanding our complex problems and better at developing pragmatic solutions.
Having the 'right people' involved really matters when you are trying to grapple with complex problems and emergent practice.
Many of the historical failures of IT projects in government can be viewed as being caused by the ‘wrong people using the wrong approach’. The traditional ‘big bang’, large, consultant-led, outsourced, waterfall approach was typically too mechanistic, took too long and dis-empowered the creativity and pragmatism of in-house staff.
The key disruption of the Platform+Agile approach was to create a way to vest in-house staff with the technology tools and ways of working that would enable them to better tackle complex problems themselves. Pre-existing Platforms and a repeatable Agile method of delivering projects created the enabling constraints required to get started more quickly and to bring an iterative and adaptive approach to tackling complex problems.
This was a disruptive breakthrough which had a huge positive impact on the staff and culture of both the IT and the line-of-business teams, as illustrated in this video. The approach enabled faster implementation, which created feedback loops and enabled iterative refinement of solutions. Staff soon learned that this was a more effective, and more personally satisfying, way to work and positively embraced the change.
4. Procurement+Waterfall
A 'Procurement+Waterfall' approach is the textbook way to implement IT projects in public sector organizations - following a mechanistic and linear flow from business case through to contracting a consulting or systems integration company to deliver the project into production.
The approach is document-heavy and focused on the creation of an individual project. Each new system requires a new project ... and usually also a new procurement and a new vendor. Each project is typically a one-off 'experiment’ in the sense that the project is usually performed by people who have never managed this type of project before, have never worked together before, doing something in a highly customized way, using technologies that are unfamiliar, involving vendors that haven't worked together before and don't know the agency, etc. etc. It is an experiment with poorly labeled reactants carried out by people unfamiliar with the lab equipment ... usually with 'surprising' results. There are too many variables in play and too many uncertainties.
The foundation of this approach is deeper than simply a preference for a particular application development and project methodology (e.g. PRINCE2). It pervades the entire program life-cycle from concept, to the way funding is sourced, to the way in-house capabilities are established and sustained, to the allocation of resources and the mobilization of teams and projects through to completion. Its premise is that the task is one-off, self-contained and sufficiently structured to be able to be implemented as a liner, perhaps phased, flow of activity from idea to execution.
Sometimes these projects work well, if all of the many reactants are well enough labeled and understood, if the right people are involved and if the problem is structured enough to be documented accurately and static enough to stay still for the duration of the project. When we look at failed IT projects in the public sector, however, we often see that 'things were not defined properly/fully at the outset', 'people didn't have the right knowledge or skills', 'things changed during the project' or 'things didn't work out as planned' with the technology or the vendors. The experiment has exploded! Surprise!
While most simple/obvious problems can usually be safely tackled by the Procurement+Waterfall method, and some complicated problems if the team is sufficiently experienced, complex problems in the health and human services sectors are unlikely to be successful if tackled this way.
5. Agile
There is considerable enthusiasm in the public sector for ‘agile’ – mostly as way to engender more creativity and ‘action orientation’ in the workplace. Hackathons and proof-of-concept or pilot initiatives are popular ways to leverage digital design and lean thinking ideas into policy and service delivery reform.
Agile methods, however, can sometimes lead to amateur experiments that produce solutions that are not fit for purpose or that cannot be scaled or sustained. The key question for an executive to ask is, "if the agile initiative is successful can it scale up to become the full production system ... or do we need to go back the beginning and repeat the project again (ahem ... properly)?"
'Platform-less' agile often leads to new digital innovations in the form of new puppies. They are fun and exciting when they are young, but puppies are for life, not just for Christmas. A prototype or pilot system developed outside of the enterprise platforms may be OK in an exploratory sense, or as a training or skill building exercise, but it is seldom useful if the goal is to advance the development of a sustainable solution to real problems in large organizations with sensitive data. Critical threshold tests of data security, integration, procurement compliance and longer term sustainability/affordability are usually failed by these projects.
As well, if time and resources are in short supply, the ‘temporary solution’ experimental nature of platform-less agile projects is obviously less productive than an agile approach which also has the benefit of producing the first minimum viable product release of a production system. Platform-less agile is inherently less productive than an agile approach that also leverages proven and sustainable platforms.
Sometimes it is better to start with the end-state in mind. The best end-state for an exciting new agile initiative is for it to keep going, to be incrementally refined and to scale to become a viable and sustainable solution - not for it to just 'fizzle out' (as is all too common) ... or even worse, 'blow up in your face'. We need digital innovations that stick.
We need agility, but we need agility that is built on robust innovation platforms and enabled by proven, repeatable, ways of mobilising and delivering projects.
6. Platform+Agile
The genesis of the Platform+Agile approach, therefore, was frustration with the evident inadequacies of both the traditional Procurement+Waterfall approach (too mechanistic/slow/risky) and the ad hoc agile approach (too extemporized/unrepeatable/risky).
As I articulated as an Ovum Analyst in 2012, public cloud service platforms are a game changer for government agencies. The leading cloud services platforms have demonstrated substantial and continuous improvement in functionality over a decade, while the in-house IT functions of government agencies have remained trapped in a 'game of snakes and ladders'.
The cloud innovation edge has made it possible for agencies to stop playing the game of snakes and ladders and instead shift to a different trajectory of innovation. Agencies that have made this shift have learned how to efficiently and quickly deliver new business systems using leading-edge shared software and infrastructure platforms. Projects have become smaller and less complex with extensive reuse of standard components, application programming interfaces (APIs) and incremental delivery. This reduces costs and risks and enhances integration and secure data sharing.
Agile methods have also become more mature over the past few years and supported by proven methodologies and ways of working.
The problem is that too few agencies know how to make the change to cloud services and agile methods. The Procurement+Waterfall approach is deeply embedded in the logic of how government agencies fund, deliver and manage IT projects. This traps agencies in low gear just when they need to be speeding up to enable widespread digital transformation.
Platform+Agile is founded on the simple and common sense idea that we should use a standardized and well proven platform to build a new application. The platform is reusable from one application to the next. It enables us to become more efficient and productive. It makes us faster and reduces the number of variables and unknowns - and hence reduces delivery time, risk and cost.
Starting with a platform also enables us to be more agile because we can get started quickly (often using in-house teams without doing any procurement because we have already procured the platform) and then implement a solution that we know is secure and will scale. We can quickly implement a minimum viable product, or MVP, and then iterate the solution based on user feedback.
The Platform+Agile approach uses secure public cloud services and the latest innovations in agile methodologies, dev/ops development tools, APIs and mobile device ecosystems. It enables fast delivery of new systems in complex organizational settings at less effort, cost and risk than either the Procurement+Waterfall approach or the platform-less agile approach.
In DHHS we have decided that public cloud services offer the best available platforms (in our case Microsoft Azure/Dynamics/Office365 and Salesforce are currently our primary platforms, with some applications developed in ServiceNow and SAP SuccessFactors). This is because we have decided that these platforms provide the best bundle of functionality, sustainability, affordability, security, ubiquitous availability and innovation. An in-progress implementation of Oracle Cloud ERP will introduce an additional platform.
The platform, for us however, is much more than the vendor and technology. It is also the bundle of procurement arrangements, contracts, vendor and partner relationships, development frameworks, methodologies, micro services, security and integration templates, APIs, operational dev/ops tools and processes that enable us to deliver projects.
Each project delivers an application on the platform and incrementally deepens and builds out the platform’s functionality and our confidence in its use. This creates a self-reinforcing sense of confidence in the platform and our ability to deploy systems using it.
This is a 'back to school moment for public sector IT teams. We need to find pragmatic ways for agencies to develop confidence in both the use of public cloud service platforms and the adoption of more agile approaches to project delivery. This is the antithesis of the traditional Procurement+Waterfall approach because it requires a conscious intent to plan and think beyond the current project - and instead to evolve towards a Platform+Agile approach that will reliably deliver a large portfolio of projects to a high cadence.
Platform+Agile projects are carefully orchestrated by people who know what they are doing and are using familiar tools to do things that they know they can confidently execute. How do they have this confidence? Because they have done this many times before in this organizational environment.
7. Finding the functionality sweet spot
A direct consequence of the Platform+Agile approach is to enable common sense to come to the fore. How many of us have worked on 'Emperor's new clothes' projects? The project is flawed from the outset or off-track, but nobody is empowered to use their common sense to change the direction. The project is 'locked in' to a mechanistic concept and plan regardless of the realities of the changing situation.
The Platform+Agile approach empowers staff to incrementally change the direction of the project in every agile sprint session to better align business needs with technology possibilities and project delivery realities.
The ability to get started on 'real work' more quickly is very empowering to staff. I call this 'finding the sweet spot'.
In the Procurement+Waterfall approach, a business case and RFQ is an attempt to identify a sweet spot of the best compromise between wants and possibilities, benefits and costs. The problem is that it is usually an academic notion - uninformed by reality-tested wants, costs and risks. The real information only emerges once the project is underway as a mechanistic highly structured, contracted, implementation program. All too often it is revealed that the concept and logic of the project were founded on incorrect, or sub-optimal, assumptions and information ... but it is too late to change.
The Platform+Agile approach, in contrast, empowers staff from both the line-of-business teams and the IT teams to start talking earlier about where the sweet spot might be. This is a discussion of “here is my problem/here is what I am trying to do” as well as “here is what we can do using our platform/here is what can be done”. This is a common sense conversation about ideas that are grounded practically in reality.
It is a conversation based on evidence - not on bold assertions made in vendor's proposals or on consultant's recommendations.
Back to school! We need to regain the opportunity in projects to empower common sense problem solving. The goal is to reach a pragmatic resolution of the questions, “what would be useful?” and “what can be done?” - within the constraints of money, time and capability. This is the sweet spot.
This conversation may also involve staff from the partner solution providers who form part of the extended in-house platform team. Finding the sweet spot is a team activity where the participants are the people who bring useful and practical knowledge to the table about business needs and technology possibilities ... and who have a stake in a longer term game that this individual project.
8. Finding the money sweet spot
Traditionally, the public sector runs a very liner approach to the allocation of funding - based on the business case for a specific application. Funds are hypothecated to a specific use that was defined in the Procurement+Waterfall manner, perhaps several years ago. If the project does not go exactly as estimated in the business case, then it is judged as having 'failed' and it is difficult to change the allocation of funding if more attractive investments emerge over the project time frame. This liner funding approach can work well enough for simple/ordered problems in highly structured environments, but seldom for complex settings and problems (like health and human services).
An alternative approach is to think like an investor, making investments in a dynamic market space and seeking to ensure that the overall portfolio of investments is delivering the best possible return.
In DHHS we run a multi-year IT project planning process which allocates funding from a departmental IT project budget across a portfolio of projects. Funding is allocated at the beginning of the financial year and then reallocated at the mid-year point based on the delivery progress of projects and benefits that have been revealed. Some projects require additional funding, others do not progress as fast or in the way that was expected and hence require less funding. Rigorous financial and project reporting/oversight controls are in place to maintain oversight of the projects and the portfolio is governed by a sub-committee of the Executive Board.
The idea of benefits revelation, in contrast to a more traditional view that benefits are realized, is important in my view. Delivering a minimum viable product solution earlier and then iterating it based on user feedback and empirical data enables the benefits of the new system to be progressively revealed. This offers much better insights than measuring benefits in a formal post-implementation review once the project is fully completed. When this is combined with a more flexible approach to funding then it is possible to reduce both risk and costs by allocating funding to projects that are delivering demonstrable benefits. Find things that work and invest more in them. Stop investing in things that don’t work as soon as this is clear.
Flexibility in the way funding is applied is an important enabler of the Platform+Agile approach.
This approach significantly reduces the cost of projects compared to the traditional approach of seeking to fully estimate the costs of the project up-front based on very imperfect information. The Platform+Agile approach revolves around allocating the funding required to deliver the MVP and then reassessing funding requirements based on much more accurate projections of the cost of subsequent iterations of the functionality.
This is finding the money sweet spot as well as the functionality sweet spot. Just enough ... not too much, not too little ... fine tune as you go.
9. Compounding Organizational Learning
The net effect of a more iterative approach to projects is compounding organizational learning. The organization climbs a staircase towards its digital transformation objectives one step at a time.
The platform is the tread of the staircase (T), providing a solid landing point for the previous agile sprint and a starting point for the next. The agile sprints are the risers (R), creating the uplift in functionality required to progress towards the goal.
The cadence of the transformation program is the slope of the stringer (S). Not too fast, nor too slow. The staircase analogy reinforces the idea that there is an optimal cadence for a transformation program in the same way that there is an optimal slope for a comfortable staircase, but also different slopes for different types of buildings and purposes.
For completeness of the analogy in regard to the Victorian era staircase drawing, the improved user experience created by more modern public cloud services platforms and mobile devices are the nose (X) and olivo moulding (O) - decorative features but also an important element of an elegant staircase.
Cadence is a crucial enabler of creating a compounding incremental approach to organisational learning. As we learned in primary school, it is better to put $1 in your bank account every month rather than $12 at the end of the year - because of compounding interest. Compounding organizational learning is fueled by a faster cadence of digital transformation enabled by the Platform+Agile approach.
This logic reinforces the probe-sense-respond cadence suggested by the Cynefin framework. Each riser is providing empirical evidence about what works and what doesn't. This knowledge is used to iteratively refine the organization’s understanding of a complex situation ... and to plan the next step.
The key benefit of this approach is early access to new data. Platform+Agile = Application + Data + Insight. The Platform+Agile approach enables faster delivery of a new business system or application. This is great because the new application supports workers to do their work, automates manual processes etc. The new application, however, also produces new data - perhaps making data available for the first time. Because the application is built in a public cloud service platform the data is in a modern database and the platform has inbuilt analytics and reporting functionality. Data from multiple applications can be easily combined in the platform using APIs. This enables the generation of insights about the effectiveness of the process, revealing things that work and things that do not.
The insights also increase our understanding of the complex policy or service delivery problem that is the overall goal. Platform+Agile = Application + Data + Insight. New insights enable the evidence based compounding organizational learning that is the essence of probing, sensing and responding.
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10. Key elements of the Platform+Agile approach
The Platform+Agile approach pulls together the above concepts to provide a practical and repeatable way for the in-house IT group to deliver projects - and for executives to regain confidence in their leadership of digital transformation.
The approach can be summarized in seven elements (as depicted in figure 1):
1. Multi-year investment portfolio approach to project funding
2. Architecting the future one application and data set at a time
3. Strategic adoption of public cloud service platforms
4. Agile mindset and rigorous Agile Project Operating Model methodology
4a. Flexible staffing models
5. Nimble Solution Delivery Panel (SDP) procurement arrangement
6. Transparency of cadence and delivery.
10.1. Multi-year investment portfolio approach to project funding
Problem: Business-case-driven funding models lead to high cost, outsourced, projects and waterfall approaches.
Solution: A more flexible way to fund projects iteratively over multiple years as a dynamic portfolio of investments managed by in-house teams. The core ingredient is an annual IT project budget that is allocated via a strategic planning process to provide 'just enough' funding to enable agile project delivery.
10.2. Architecting the future one application and data set at a time
Problem: Sovereign projects create fragmented, duplicative, applications and data.
Solution: Pragmatic architecting of applications and data, within a department-wide ICT strategy and enterprise architecture perspective, to guide projects to a more coherent and integrated future state. The goal is to start the process of building a more integrated enterprise architecture today and build it out one project at a time.
10.3. Strategic adoption of public cloud service platforms
Problem: Every project uses a different mix of solution technologies and vendors - creating complex, inflexible, ad hoc, technology and contractual arrangements and high costs.
Solution: Trustworthy public cloud service platforms that are used strategically and shared across many different solutions, enabling standardized and integrated solutions that reuse micro services components and that are scalable and operationally sustainable.
10.4. Agile mindset and rigorous Agile Project Operating Model methodology
Problem: Both mechanistic linear design mindsets and ad hoc agile approaches embed unacceptable costs and risks into projects.
Solution: A rigorous Agile Project Operating Model methodology and an enablement team that support rapid mobilization of projects, disciplined dev/ops processes and predictable outcomes. The model is based on the PRINCE2 Agile and SAFe frameworks. The Agile Project Operating Model is the 'recipe book' for successful agile project delivery.
Stop Press: 10.4a Flexible staffing models
Problem: Ad hoc and reactive public sector staffing models under-value strategic on-going in-house staff capability and over-value fixed-term contractors and consultants sourced project-by-project. Result? Unsustainable 'knee-jerk' management of people.
Solution: A structured Staffing Model that fosters the growth of strategic in-house capabilities and enables an appropriate mix of contractors and consultants sourced to deliver portfolios of projects.
10.5. Nimble Solution Delivery Panel (SDP) procurement arrangement
Problem: In-house teams must scale up to meet project demand, but procurement processes are inefficient and slow.
Solution: A panel of vendors on standard contracts to create strategic partnerships, speed up procurement and reduce procurement bureaucracy. The Solution Delivery Panel (SDP) is a significant innovation in procurement process. Several hundred service requests have been delivered through the panel and the department has developed trusted partnerships with vendors through deep-repeat experience over many projects.
10.6. Transparency of cadence and delivery
Problem: Executives think that IT projects take too long and fail too often.
Solution: 6-9 month project delivery cadence, transparent project portfolio reporting and showcasing of success to reinforce compounding organizational learning. Seeing is believing. The best way to regain confidence in project delivery is to deliver more projects, more quickly and to be seen to have done so.
11. Benefits of the Platform+Agile approach
11.1 Benefits for clients, patients and citizens
This new digital transformation approach has enabled DHHS to successfully deliver over 50 new business systems on cloud service platforms over the past three years. In 2020 DHHS passed the tipping point where most of the systems in its Application Register were based on cloud services platforms. This is a unique achievement in the Australian public sector.
The Platform+Agile approach has created disruptive benefits for clients, patients and staff through delivery of an unprecedented portfolio of new business systems spanning the full breadth of the department’s operations. Many of the new systems are complex multi-agency information sharing solutions with high data security requirements. Key benefits include:
Each of these positive outcomes could have been delayed or not achieved if the enabling technology project had not been completed successfully. The Platform+Agile approach enabled the projects to be delivered.
11.2 Wide benefits for the department
The program of work has created many positive motivational outcomes for the department and for government innovation more generally by restoring executive confidence in technology projects.
This has been an important outcome because it is vital that executives are confident in their ability to lead technology-enabled policy and services delivery reforms. The reality, however, is that many are not. A history of failed projects and adverse audit reports into government IT projects had undermined executive confidence in the capacity of the public sector to successfully deliver projects.
There are few policy and service delivery reforms of any consequence that do not now require implementation of a technology project ... so restoring executive confidence in project execution is a key enabler of public sector innovation.
The Platform+Agile work program has led to confidence-building recognition of several members of the DHHS IT leadership team at the highest levels of public sector executive achievement (Fiona Sparks was recognized in the 2018 IPAA Top50 Women while Jodie Quilliam PSM and Ray Baird PSM were recognized in the Queen's Birthday Honours in 2018 and 2019 respectively).
Individual projects have also been recognized in leading Australian IT industry and public sector awards:
The relentless incrementalism of the Platform+Agile approach has enabled DHHS to become an acknowledge exemplar of agile digital transformation in the public sector over a sustained period. To illustrates this, the department is the only organisation in Australia to have a nomination in the finals of the IT industry's preeminent national awards program, the IT News Benchmark Awards, for four consecutive years (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020). The department is also the only organisation to be ranked in the top 10 of CIO Magazine's CIO50 awards for five consecutive years (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020,2021).
11.3 Digital fitness and endurance
One of the key impacts of the Platform+Agile approach for DHHS has been the accretion of digital transformation capacity, and the value that it creates, over a sustained five year period.
This is a form of value that is often underestimated in large organizations. Many leaders incorrectly assume that the capacity to execute digital transformation exists innately in their organization or can be acquired transactionally when needed by hiring transformation teams, consultants and systems integration firms.
Our experience in DHHS reveals that digital transformation capacity is best regarded as the muscle that connects vision and execution. It takes hard work to develop, needs to be exercised regularly to become effective and accumulates incrementally over time. If the muscles are weak then visions, strategies and plans - no matter how worthy - remain substantially or wholly unrealized.
Over the past five years the Platform+Agile approach has enabled DHHS to systemically strengthen and deepen its digital fitness and endurance. This is revealed in an increased capacity to:
The accretion of these capabilities over time creates a compounding organisational learning effect that fuels ambition to strive for more and better outcomes, as well as a commitment for continuous improvement.
The most important effect of better digital fitness is the growth of trust between 'business' and 'technology' teams. Executives come to learn that the in-house technology team can be relied upon to work pragmatically and collaboratively to deliver outcomes. This leads to an increased propensity to support digital transformation initiatives with investment, to actively sponsor innovative projects and to allocate the best resources to project teams.
One way to appreciate the impact, and value, of this sort of fitness is to reflect on its absence. What would a lack of the above digital transformation capabilities feel like?
Inexplicably, technology-enabled innovation is being frustrated but nobody really knows why. Apparently worthy and well developed business cases fail to receive funding. Project proposals seem incapable of being progressed beyond Powerpoint slides, take too long, reach a dead end or go off the rails without producing the desired outcomes.
Failure to successfully develop digital transformation capabilities creates a negative compounding organization learning effect. Executives learn that digital transformation is 'too hard' or 'too risky'. Ambition declines. Rather than developing sustainably over time, digital transformation capability either never emerges or it erodes (for example when capable teams are disbanded at the end of a project).
The result is best summarized by the famous quote from ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
When confidence in digital transformation capabilities is low or declines 'digital mojo' is lost - the organization starts to take fewer shots ... and shots that are taken too often miss the goal. Worthy proposals for technology-enabled innovation that are never funded or mobilized into deliverable projects are shots that are never taken. Projects that go off the rails are shots that miss the goal.
The fundamental point behind the Platform+Agile approach is for the organization to become confident in its ability to take more, better aimed, shots.
In the public sector the 'game' is a financial year. A 'goal' is a successfully delivered technology-enabled policy or service delivery reform project. The CIO's role, and that of any executive leading organizational transformation, is to create and sustain an environment within which the in-house teams increase their goal scoring average over multiple games ... and keep doing it for the entire season.
Start keeping score!
12. Conclusions
The results achieved by the Platform+Agile approach have been impressive. Executive confidence in digital transformation is improved, investment is increased, important strategic policy and service delivery reforms have been enabled. Project delivery cadence is increased.
Digital Mojo is back!
The point of all of this is that, as CIO, I do not know exactly what technologies and digital solutions will be required to enable the department to achieve it mission. This is really for the line-of-business executives to work out in the context of how best to solve their policy and service delivery challenges in the midst of an agile sprint.
Of course, the CIO and the Business Technology & Information Management team have many ideas about new technologies and how they can be used to enable innovation, but these ideas are just ideas outside of an opportunity to put them into effect. The hard bit is orchestrating an opportunity for new technologies to be applied to solve a business problem in an effective, affordable, scalable, secure and sustainable way.
The one thing that we can be sure of is that we will need to be faster at implementing these technologies and faster at learning what works and what doesn't. This is what we are doing in DHHS.
My role as CIO, and that of my team, is to create an environment within which the sweet spot can be found, the MVP delivered and compounding organizational learning to occur. If we do this then digital transformation will 'look after itself'.
Digital transformation is not a goal or a destination. Nor is it a direction. It is a way of travelling ... a way of embracing the thrill of the journey. It is a by-product of the digital fitness that emerges from pragmatic, effective and common-sense application of technology to solve business problems.
The Platform+Agile approach empowers us all to keep calm and do useful things better.
This enables the pragmatic relentless incrementalism which is my preferred way to deliver truly transformative results that are owned by the teams that deliver them.
13. More Information
13.1 Prior Publications
13.2 Summary of 50+ New Business Systems Created Using the Platform+Agile Approach
Eight noteworthy projects exemplify the effectiveness of the Platform+Agile approach. The systems, which have all been delivered on public cloud service platforms (Microsoft Azure PaaS/Dynamics/Office365, Salesforce and ServiceNow), include:
1. The Housing Register Online Application
This is a significant example of digital transformation of core service delivery processes by enabling people to apply for social housing via the Commonwealth's My.gov portal. Clients are able to self-serve to register for social housing using a smartphone or any computer.
2. The Family Violence Referral L17 System
This system automated the processing of L17 family violence referrals from Victoria Police to social services agencies. The system was developed in Siebel on Microsoft Azure in just nine months to streamline the allocation of over 150,000 referrals per year.
3. The Risk Assessment Management Panel Information Sharing System (RISS)
Risk Assessment Management Panels (RAMPs) are multi-agency meetings convened to coordinate service responses to protect clients exposed to the most critical family violence risks. The RISS application was developed in ServiceNow to support RAMP meetings by recording essential case details and actions plans whilst also respecting the imperatives to protect client privacy.
4. The Client Incident Management System (CIMS)
CIMS transformed the reporting and management of incidents affecting clients in children youth & family services, disability services, health services and housing & community building services. The system was developed by the in-house team using Microsoft Azure PaaS to create a unifying portal for over 1,700 agencies to register incidents and then manage investigation and reporting processes.
5. The Victorian Health Incident Management System - Central Service (VHIMS CS)
The Victorian Health Incident Management System (VHIMS) streamlines the reporting and management of patient and staff safety incidents in hospitals. The new system, developed by the in-house team using Microsoft Azure PaaS, is currently operational in thirty nine health services and will be progressively adopted across the sector.
6. Systems for Family Safety Victoria to improve family violence services
Family Safety Victoria (FSV) is the focal point for the Government’s strategic family violence program. A suite of systems was developed by the in-house team using Microsoft Azure PaaS, Dynamics 365 and PowerBI to support the implementation of a Central Information Point (CIP) and a client relationship system (CRM), multi-agency risk assessment framework and analytics tools for staff in The Orange Door support and safety hubs.
7. SafeScript
SafeScript is the cornerstone of a four-year reform program to implement real time prescription monitoring in Victoria. The system allows prescription records for high-risk medicines to generate real time alerts for doctors, nurse practitioners and pharmacists during a consultation. This enables life-saving decisions to be made quickly if there is clinical risk. The system, developed by the Fred IT Group on Microsoft Azure PaaS, has won multiple industry awards and was instrumental in providing a pragmatic path forward for the re-mobilisation of a stalled national real time prescription monitoring scheme.
8. Personal Hardship Assistance Payments (PHAP) System
The Personal Hardship Assistance Program provides assistance to people experiencing financial hardship because of a single house fire or a natural disaster related emergency such as bushfire, flood, severe storm or earthquake. The new PHAP system allows staff to administer payments from any computer or mobile device and supports issuing debit cards at relief centres to make funds available more quickly. The system enabled more than 14,000 payments to be efficiently and securely processed during the 2020 Victorian bushfire crisis – changing the lives of Victorians at their most vulnerable moments.
40+ Other new business systems delivered using the Platform+Agile approach include:
Manager Data & Analysis, Mental Health & Addictions at Ministry of Health New Zealand
1yVery timely ! So important for cross agency / provider network / cross boundary developments to access and share data eg, rapid applications / CRM for vulnerable cohorts etc. Especially relevant to multi-disciplinary teams and pilots being able to capture both operational data, but also understand real measures of service effectiveness for fast service design and improvement iterations. Removing boundaries also creates incentives for join commissioning approaches and joint platform and agile programmes !
EHealth Enthusiast who believes that Digital Tools can make a huge positive impact on the patient and healthcare professional experience. Leading CODECs Health and public sector programme.
3yThank you for sharing. Many learnings for us all who are collaborating on making health services more Patient focused.
Agilist - opinions posted are personal and not on behalf of NSW Health
3yA great article from a couple of years ago.
Global VP/Director of Products & Chief Technology Officer (CTO) - Healthcare & Life Sciences | 1st to build Global Health Cloud SaaS digital platform (>$5m ARR in 2nd year)
4yI know this isn't a new paper but I just read it and it very much align to my own strategy and approach. Thank you for taking the time to write this comprehensive PoV and share your experience, very useful. Plus it gives hope to other government agencies. The one thing I am wondering is, although you have a governing body that decides where to invest, you haven't discussed how you are managing the overarching architecture that sits above the multiple platforms you have selected (e.g. MS, SF, SNOW, etc.) and how you make decisions on which platform you will use for to solve which problem (you might need more than one too). This is more an enterprise architecture question but I am interested on how you are doing it in your organisation ?
EY Canada Human Services Lead
4yLee Miezis