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Government CXO

New Zealand GCIO in conversation

By Laurence Millar | 23 March 2011

Ten years ago, Brendan Boyle was appointed to lead the New Zealand e-government programme, in response to growing support among agency Chief Executives for a coordinated approach across government. In 2003 he moved to the position of Chief Executive at Land Information NZ, and was appointed Chief Executive of the Department of Internal Affairs in 2008

I worked on putting NZ government on-line in the 1990s, launching an early government portal, before leaving to work in Asia for five years. When I returned to NZ at the end of 2003, I was selected to take over from Brendan, and over the next five years led the NZ e-government effort, resigning from the position of GCIO in 2009.

So when I learned that Brendan had been chosen as New Zealand’s second GCIO, the opportunity for a conversation was too good to pass up. Here are the results:

What has led to the current arrangements?

The genesis of it was discussions at the Ministerial Committee on Government ICT, which is led by the Deputy Prime Minister and attended by several Chief Executives, including myself. The Prime Minister said he wanted a briefing, and the first question he asked when I went to meet him was “Why have we not got a government CIO?” Since your departure, there had been discussion on the role, and we looked at three options – disestablish the role, keep it as a policy role at the centre of government, or move it into operational agency. Ministers chose the third option, and wanted the role to be vested in the Chief Executive, to make sure it is at the right level.

So what are your responsibilities as Secretary of Internal Affairs?

I must say it has taken some time for me to get up to speed on all of them – the Department has a wide range of responsibilities, which will be further extended with the addition of National Library and Archives New Zealand, subject to legislation that is currently under debate.

How will you find the time for the GCIO role?

There is always a tension between providing leadership at the right level of seniority and the time that senior people have to give to the role; the secret is to get the right balance and we are developing robust plans to achieve this. I am setting up the Office of the GCIO, which will provide me with the support in my role.

I will also be relying on the Deputy Chief Executives who will be appointed early next year. The DCE, Knowledge, Information, Research and Technology will drive the integration of the National Library, Archives NZ, Government Technology Services and the Office of the GCIO. There is a good fit between the groups – we can see synergies by bringing together operations and policy for information management across government. The combined teams have a good depth and breadth of capabilities in the information domain.

What are the targets that you are aiming for?

There will be some hard measures of the level of use of online services and there will be some softer measures around culture and working together.

The short to medium term targets for the uptake of i.govt and one.govt (the shared services for identity management and secure network) are clear, and we are getting to critical mass on the shared services that were started while you were in the role.

The Prime Minister, in a speech to CIOs earlier in the year, opened by saying: “My vision is a modern public service, dominated by e-government”. As you know, his background in the financial sector means that he is very au fait with what technology can do, and he wants us to lift our game – not just providing information but a major shift in the way we transact with the public.

In NZ we have some good examples in the G2B space – the Companies Office, Land Online and Customs, all of which are at 100% uptake. So the effort now is going into G2C – students and the social sector – which is where a lot of investment is happening. The public are much more used to the online channel in their private lives and are asking why can’t government do this too? The ServiceLink programme will provide an integrated online service platform, which will cover the majority of government business with citizens.

My other major emphasis as GCIO will be to lead the Chief Executive (CE) community to a more collective approach. This will be harder to measure, and harder to achieve, and we are looking at project and program indicators for the required culture shift.

The current fiscal pressure has driven a much higher level of recognition among CEs of the need to work together so that we can afford all the things we want to do. CEs are becoming a lot more aware of the potential for channel shift, as are Ministers. We can’t just open up new channels and add costs, we need to get substitution, even moving from call centres to the net. For agencies the default will be to make services available online, and to do so using common shared services.

I think that this is where a CE holding the role of GCIO makes a real difference - I am able to have effective discussions with my CE colleagues, and with Ministers, to achieve the progress across government as a whole.

What about the current trends in products and technologies?

Cloud? We have done a bit on cloud. The cloud ticks all the boxes on efficiency – but the security and sovereignty issues are important to us, and they are reasonably complex. The products will get there, but it will take some time. [DIA will issue a tender for infrastructure as a service shortly]. While there are some early adopters in the NZ public sector, we are taking a pretty conservative approach – while there has been a lot of noise, some say it is a re-branding of previous industry offerings.

Open data? Our approach has been to push as much information out there as possible. We got data.govt up last year, which had strong support early on from the Hon. Bill English - Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance - and is now growing steadily, in both content and usage.

Open source? – The official position continues to be that choice of technology should be based on factors such as fit for purpose, and total cost of ownership, rather than on fixed positions. In my experience with the OGC [Open Geospatial Consortium] and other bodies, Open Source has proven to be a viable option.

Social Media? – Most government agencies, including DIA, have some experience, but our understanding still needs to develop. CEs have commissioned communications professionals across government to develop options about how government might use and understand social media more effectively. You can’t place boundaries and controls in the way that you can with other services, and so we need to experiment. It is important to be authentic - you have to write the blog yourself and regularly, you have to be the person that tweets. To be honest, I am not a power user, and with the time pressures as Secretary of Internal Affairs, I think it unlikely I will be taking a personal leadership role.

There are some tight connections between IT, Library and Archives professionals, especially in the areas of government information management, metadata and Records Management. Do you think other governments should be looking at this?

Interestingly in the feedback for the change [to merge the organisations], a number of the comments have been “don’t you know that no one else in the world is doing this” - as if that’s a reason why we shouldn’t do it. I’m confident that the configuration that we have got is going to work because it brings the capability together.

There is the technical capability - in metadata and interoperability; the National Library has taken social media further than any other NZ government organisation - for example the leadership provided by Digital New Zealand; the Aotearoa People’s Network, providing free Internet access in libraries around New Zealand fits well with the Servicelink future for online service delivery; for Records Management there is value in the archivists working closely with the technology people. If we can harness those capabilities, services and resources with the shared services already provided by GTS, it can become scalable - a centre of expertise for information management in government.

Over time, as the public sector changes in New Zealand, there could be other information centric services and functions that could land there. The idea of bringing the departments together is not just for the synergies in their current work, but also about creating a more scalable capability.

How do you see the UN rankings, and where NZ sits in them?

I am pretty cynical about rankings – I remember some years ago, when I was in the e-government director role, a survey placed NZ government down the list, because we did not have on-line tax returns. I phoned the consulting company who did the survey and said “did you know we had re-engineered the tax collection process, and there is no need for most New Zealanders to file a tax return – surely that is transformation, and it is better than automation”, but they had not done the research.

Having said that, the ratings are a guide on where to look for improvements. I am interested in Singapore, they are always a bit of a litmus test – although in any comparison you need to take into account the different government context and country “culture”.

I do not have a specific strategy for climbing the rankings. We will focus on putting transactions online and taking the end-to-end view from the customer’s perspective, and I know that will come through in those rankings. If you can do e-government well for business, that obviously has a wider economic impact - anything you can do to keep down the cost of interactions has got to be good for citizens and government. The important ranking, the only one that really counts, is what the public think.

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