Request for feedback

The GCDO was asked to provide feedback on the Public Service Commission’s proposed Long-term Insights Briefings as part of the consultation process. You can find further details about Long-term Insights Briefings and the consultation process on the Public Service Commission’s website.

Our second Long-term Insights Briefing — Te Kawa Mataaho | Public Service Commission

Proposed topics and key questions

1. Future of the public service workforce: What work will the future public service need to do and what sort of workforce will be needed to do it?
2. Future of public service integrity: What does a public service culture of integrity look like and how can New Zealand proactively address integrity risks in the future?
3. Future of public service organisations: How should public service agencies be organised in the future to best address the complex problems facing New Zealand?

Overview of the Government Chief Digital Officer feedback

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the Public Service Commission’s proposed Long-term Insights Briefing topics. In my role as Government Chief Digital Officer and given the constrained fiscal environment, I would like to see agencies respond by becoming more efficient, effective and digitally enabled.

The currently constrained fiscal environment is creating urgency around how the public service operates and we are at a critical decision point between:

• maintaining status quo across the public service with less resourcing over time, or
• reimagining the public service so that it’s more efficient, effective and digitally enabled.

If there is acceptance that we should move past status quo, we recommended that the Public Service Commission focuses on the topic of ‘Future of public service organisations’, with a secondary focus on ‘Future of the public service workforce’ because of the significant causal relationship.

While we recognise the importance of the ‘Future of public service integrity’ as a topic, the other topics seem more relevant to the current context for the New Zealand public service and the issues we are facing into the future.

How should public service agencies be organised in the future to best address the complex problems facing New Zealand?

The Government Chief Digital Office (GCDO) function has a role to provide strategic direction to the public service around the digital government agenda. This was articulated in the 2020 Strategy for a Digital Public Service (SfDPS) which outlined the objective of using digital technology and methods to improve the efficiency, productivity, and delivery of public services to achieve better outcomes for New Zealand.

The SfDPS highlights the following key focus areas:

• Integrated services for people and business - Integrated services to provide all New Zealanders with a better experience of government.

• Leadership, people, culture — strong leadership to drive public sector collaboration and cultural change. Adopting flexible and facilitative ways of working.

• Digital foundations - digital foundations used across the public service, with reuseable data, rules and transactions, as well as government-wide standards and frameworks.

  Digital Investment - Investment in digital, data and ICT take an all-of-government view to ensure future investment is targeted, efficient and creates public value.

• New ways of working - Digital transformation is not just about putting new technology in place, it’s about new ways of working. This means the public service working together, across agencies, being flexible and mobile, and using appropriate practices to deliver better services for all New Zealanders.

The vision to support the notion of an increasingly unified public service is not new, and is a direction of travel that we have been supporting in a number of ways for many years. If we want the public service to make further progress towards this vision, we should consider:

Increasingly cross-agency delivery of public services

Less individual agencies holding exclusive delivery responsibility and capabilities. Agencies partnering to deliver services to overlapping user groups will deliver a more unified customer experience, will be more productive, and save on costs.

A different approach to the leadership, people, culture exhibited across the public service.

Leaders would be aligned to overall public service outcomes rather than a specific organisation delivering an isolated service. This would flow down to public servants who would also be similarly less bound to a specific organisation and more the outcomes that they are supporting. The culture within the public service would reflect this interdependency between delivery functions in support of shared outcomes and would consequently be necessarily flexible and adaptive.

Build system assets rather than organisational assets

The increasing ubiquitousness of digital foundations across the public service delivery organisations would inevitably lead to a high degree of consolidation of these foundations — within sector and/or centralised public service functions. The focus should be on procurement and setting commercial terms that offer all-of-government value and uptake. This will allow the public service to build system assets rather than organisational assets, and the sharing of data and technology should be built into operational models. This consolidation would allow greater efficiency and effectiveness of public service capability deployment.

Digital investment is likely to become less discretionary over time within public service agencies

It will be considerably more efficient and effective to administer standardised digital components from a centralised delivery function. Digital investment direction will become a mix of either prescribed (and likely administered) digital system assets, and discretionary bespoke or specialised digital assets. Agencies should increasingly only have decision rights around specialised digital infrastructure.

An increasingly adaptable workforce with agile ways of working

Multidisciplinary teams across policy, technology, legal and delivery functions to work on initiatives from end to end, horizontal governance, focus on outcomes and users, customer insights and iteration. People capability policies and processes need to enable staff mobility across the system.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi is recognised as a founding principle of the public service

This is reflected through policies which include and are co-designed with Māori. The public workforce will need to have both the technical skills to adapt to new technology and the knowledge of how technology impacts and can support Māori. Co-designed, mutually beneficial Māori data governance should be prioritised to add value to the official data ecosystem through te ao Māori insights and innovations.

Active and dynamic use of technology enables user-centric public service delivery

Fundamentally, if the public service shifts towards more active and dynamic use of technology, this will enable flexibility and mobility to enable more tailored and user centric delivery of public services. Emergent technology such as AI is likely to play a growing and disruptive role in the delivery of services and consideration through long-term insights will be valuable to ensuring that the public service can adapt to future developments.

What work will the future public service need to do and what sort of workforce will be needed to do it?

Digital workforce challenges will be key to consider when looking at how the public service organises itself in the future, and a more coordinated approach will be needed to address this.

The challenges of recruiting, retaining and growing digital capability are global issues

New Zealand competes with other countries and large technology companies for digital talent. Agencies are facing the same challenges as the private sector in hiring and retaining staff with digital skills. Different agency capabilities impact on resilience and responsiveness and affect the public service as a whole. The most resilient and responsive agencies during the COVID-19 response typically had a higher level of digital capability.

The public service continues to experience difficulty filling digital roles, particularly senior specialists. The demand for digital specialists is likely to continue to increase and this puts digitising government at risk. Agencies have supplemented internal digital capability by engaging contractors and consultants to deliver service modernisation work, much of which is time bound. Agency spend on contractors to support the delivery of major digital projects and programmes contributed significantly to overall government contractor spend throughout 2022 and 2023.

Work to build internal capability will not be a quick fix. However, we have an opportunity to focus on long term results through engaging in system-level, long-term strategic workforce planning and changes to the way the public service workforce operates and is managed.

Growing and upskilling public servants in digital skills is crucial

Developing tailored digital training programmes for New Zealand’s public workforce is key to increasing skills in technology and should include Māori perspectives, including Māori data sovereignty. All public servants, including leaders, will need to become digitally literate.

An essential step to achieving this is implementing a standard skill framework across government to enable a common language around describing digital skills.

The Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) is a globally recognised technical competency and skills framework for the digital world. Used by other governments including Australia, SFIA helps identify the types of digital skills that government and businesses need to operate, both now and in the future. It also supports the development of digital technology career pathways and the targeting of professional development for private and public sector employees. New Zealand has an SFIA country licence, currently funded jointly by Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) and Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE).

We would like to see SFIA implemented across the public service. Benefits include the ability to better attract, retain and develop more people into and within the public service’s digital workforce. In addition to these benefits, continuing with SFIA adoption would show government role modelling the transformation needed in industry.

People capability policies, and processes need to be addressed to enable staff mobility across the system. Tight staffing levels and agency priorities make it extremely difficult to release staff for secondment or reskilling activities. Enabling mobility and flexible learning environments would be a significant cultural shift for government. We will need to consider how the public service could provide alternative contractual arrangements and enable different models of workforce recruitment and retention that facilitates central deployment to agencies, rather than individual agencies holding these employment relationships.

We would like to see the Long-term Insights Briefing consider what extent could New Zealand consider lessons from international digital government leaders and adapt to our country’s culture and context.

As an example, South Korea is a leading digital government and in 2023 topped the OECD Digital Government Index for the second time. Their public sector digital talent skills are embedded in a broader strategy. Public servants are trained from the start when they join the civil service and digital competence training is supported through the Digital Education Academy. Public servants rotate between agencies every 2 to 3 years and they have smart incentives to develop professions. Attraction to this profession is motivated through cyber security camps with young people in winter breaks, plus training programmes and job opportunities.

What governance, accountability, and coordination arrangements will be needed?

GCDO agrees that further work needs to be undertaken to explore how the public service can operate between centralisation and devolution, focusing on whole-of-system leadership, cross-agency collaboration, and aligning common functions. Practical activity-based models such as Agile and other methods that utilise emergent technology such as AI should be considered too.

Governance

New ministerial and chief executive level governance mechanisms will be required to ensure the development and implementation of new horizontal ‘system’ leadership models. There will need to be clear vertical alignment between the various layers of governance and these potentially formally embedded alongside existing Cabinet processes. Cross agency operational groups will also need to be integrated into the structures so that delivery is appropriately governed.

Mechanisms such as the Interagency Executive Board (IEB) may need be utilised more widely as efforts to embed cross agency funding and delivery is promulgated.

Accountability

Initial efforts to establish stronger vertical alignment of agencies in areas such as digital may not necessarily require immediate changes to chief executives’ legislative accountabilities, but this may be required over time as specific decision rights are transferred to shared or centralised delivery entities. This could include changes to the Public Finance Act, Public Service Act and specific agency legislation.

Coordination arrangements

Clearly, the expectation that agencies increasingly coordinate the delivery of their services will require support. As well as the establishment of coherent vertical (system) governance mechanisms, there will need to be fit-for-purpose cross agency collaborative platforms and tools.

Paul James

Government Chief Digital Officer