Published on the 25/02/2016 | Written by Clare Coulson
This week 100-plus government leaders, technology decision makers and leading lights of the technology industry gathered at the first ever NZTech Advance: Government and Technology Summit…
The Summit was designed by NZTech, New Zealand’s technology industry association, to discuss how to improve technology procurement and use in the public sector.
NZTech CEO, Graeme Muller, said: “We know that technology can help the transformation of government agencies and we know it’s available now, but the question for this summit was ‘how do we help the government to change the way they do things?’.”
According to Muller, The Honourable Bill English, Minister of Finance, “hit the nail of the head” when he opened the summit. English said that the big change and opportunity for government is to not just do things the way they used to, investing in more prison facilities and hospital beds, but to actually flip things around and use technology to help reduce the number of people who are sent to prison or who require hospital resources by connecting up schools, social welfare, IRD, prisons etc to look at some of the causes and effects.
Muller facilitated a Leaders Summit alongside the main summit, in which 20 leaders of both government and the tech sector came together to come up with list of key challenges for technology in government. for how to make the most of technology in government. Primary among them was the challenge of working collaboratively and agilely with a fail-fast philosophy in an environment which is constantly under public, media and government scrutiny. To facilitate this, they identified the need for leaders to become more tech savvy and to stop seeing technology projects as high-risk zones. They also said that the way that industry and government work together has not evolved enough and that technology projects need to be a win-win for all parties.
Jen Rutherford, director of government relations for NZTech, chaired the event, and said that for her part she noticed a genuine desire on the part of government agencies to understand how to go about using technology in government.
She said there was a very positive response to John Sheridan, CTO and procurement co-ordinator for the Australian Government. He was very lively and open about the processes they ran and that some of them could be useful in New Zealand, she said. For example, before releasing an RFP, the Australian Government communicates its ideas with the community and publishes its intentions on a blog. It only draws up the RFP once it has considered the feedback so it results in a much more informed RFP.
She also highlighted IRD’s deputy commissioner for change, Greg James, who shared details on the IRDs transformation project which, for the time being, is still under budget, ahead of schedule. The 10-year, $1.5 billion project seeks to do exactly what Minister English alluded to in his opening speech: change the way that government interacts with the public and what services it delivers to them.
