The NSW Department of Customer Service has warned against over reliance of digital solutions to solve community issues, highlighting the importance of inclusion in the digital government service delivery age.
Deputy secretary for customer delivery and transformation Sarah Cruickshank told a Digital NSW 2023 showcase event in Sydney yesterday that the department is considering how customer-focused plans “reflect the public policy priorities of the government”.
She said digital solutions aren’t the sole solution to building harmonious communities.
“Digital cannot be the only answer for how we deliver government services, support and programs,” Cruickshank said.
“Over reliance on digital, whilst it will cater for the majority of people, actually runs the risk of creating and entrenching even further isolation for those that are already not feeling as connected to society as they should.”
Cruickshank said the focus of government is around “social cohesion”, adding that NSW DCS has specific targets to ensure “that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have the equivalent access to digital services and general digital inclusion as the rest of the population by 2026.”
During the talk, Cruickshank said that social cohesion was also impacted by macro factors – outside of the government’s control – notably “international security”.
“Unfortunately, international security is something that has become more and more a space that governments are occupied with, and are investing heavily in. This obviously has cybersecurity implications as well,” she said.
“But just generally, geopolitical security is causing a lot of angst within communities”.
Cruickshank said social and economic wellbeing is another aspect, with governments less focused on constant growth but rather ensuring basic community needs are meet.
“Australia has been largely immune until very recently from challenges with social cohesion,” she said.
“Unfortunately, in recent months we’ve seen some fracturing of what has normally been a very harmonious society in Australia.
“There are other countries around the world that are in a much more difficult situation than we are. But we need to do everything as governments to ensure that we maintain and strengthen the cohesion within our society.”
Customer metrics
Cruickshank said when the first State of the Customer report, which measures nearly 40 service lines across NSW government, landed earlier this year “we were obviously incredibly pleased with the results”.
The report revealed 77 percent of people found NSW services easy to access, 75 percent were satisfied and 73 percent trusted the government to deliver its services.
However, Cruickshank pointed out the pandemic “taught us a lot about how we need to engage better as government with communities.”
“That was the first time that government realised we had to get much better at how we communicated information to communities that were impacted, but also how we worked with those communities to help us in the way we supported those communities.”
Data linkage and use
Cruickshank also said while government has “so much data”, it has “still not yet come to terms with how to effectively link it” together.
There is still struggle around “how we make the privacy and governance that is so important in the management of the data work in a way that allows governments to achieve the policy outcomes they need to achieve.”
“My concern around that is there’s very good reasons for privacy protections, there’s very good reasons for strong governance, and there’s a lot of historic and legacy reasons as to why the data and systems don’t talk to each other yet.
“But our customers and our community expect government to be able to get a handle on this. So, this is the big thing for us in the in the coming years,” Cruickshank said.
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