This article is written by Dr Alan Thorogood, Senior Visiting Fellow at UNSW and formerly Head of Strategy for Australia's DTA, and Dr Kate Harrington, Head of Strategic Digital Initiatives in the NSW Department of Customer Service.

Policymaking in government is, in its simplest form, about why and how governments provide services.

What’s often referred to as "Big 'P' policy” concerns citizen outcomes in areas such as health and education or location of public infrastructure. “Little 'p' policy”, on the other hand, addresses efficiency in public service practices, such as government procurement processes or recruitment of personnel to reflect diversity targets.

The practice of adopting a life events approach to service delivery puts the public at the centre of both these types of policy.

Traditionally, a government department would think about service delivery through an efficiency and impact lens, which puts the department's bang-for-buck at the centre of the decision.

The department would consider citizens' needs but would not seek out ancillary requirements from other departments or the private sector.

The life event journey approach puts this on its head.

A life event approach considers all the services that a person needs and how they will access those services. For example, on the death of a loved one, people may need services from government registrars, health departments, banks, insurance companies, undertakers, and others. Applying customer experience (CX) techniques to integrate services at major psychological events in people’s lives radically improves service, access, quality and reduces costs.

In this article, we will seek to explain why so many policymakers are exploring this new approach, and what governments need to do in order to enable it.

The gears we need to put in motion

Governments taking a life events approach, such as Denmark and New South Wales, Australia, have changed little 'p' policies about how they work and collaborate — something we addressed in a previous article for Apolitical. These necessary changes fall under three broad categories: data sharing, technology enablement and capability building.

1. Data sharing

Data sharing is necessary for the life events approach because data is the fuel that drives digital services. Without sharing data about the citizen's needs, service providers cannot join up delivery.

Government's should develop a workforce transition and reskilling policy to ensure the transition from traditional, transactional services towards digital capabilities focussed first on skilling staff to uptake new roles

But sharing data requires policymakers to think through complex ethical, privacy and security issues. Ethics are complex when service providers use information in unanticipated ways, and informed consent is not easy either. Privacy, therefore, becomes a critical concern. Agencies must share data to provide services, but the data belongs to the citizen, not to the agency.

Finally, there is a duty of care around security with an ever-evolving threat profile. Policymaking needs to consider these issues carefully. There are no pre-prepared solutions. To read more about these challenges and how people are overcoming them, we recommend “Managing Digital Innovation: A Knowledge Perspective.

2. Technology

Technology enables joined-up life event services by integrating multiple agencies and the private sector.

What if we had excellent joined-up services around changing your home address? A comprehensive service would notify your driver's licence authority, electoral roll, post office, bank and online shopping services.

Sharing notifications and systems introduce unexpected consequences. An example is cloud computing policies, which is often owned or at least implemented by the IT provider, often a private company. Therefore, policymakers need to re-consider where data is stored and who has access.

Reorganising the public sector workforce to deliver services with life event journeys in mind requires a workforce mobility policy

Cloud computing also shares the costs with the organisations using the shared resource. The consequence is collaborative governance and funding models. A further complication is that trust is necessary. With insufficient confidence in other parties, there is inadequate investment in shared infrastructure, so data sharing becomes impossible.

Finally, advances in robotic process automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence impact the public sector workforce through role automation and augmentation. AI will have a profound and imminent impact on both front line and back-office roles. We hear these concerns in our discussions with other countries' governments too.

3. Capability building

Improving the delivery of services requires an uplift in digital capability including a focus on developing digital skills in the public service, transforming agency culture through the digital literacy of senior leadership, and attracting and retaining new digital talent.

Reorganising the public sector workforce to deliver services with life event journeys in mind requires a workforce mobility policy. With mobility, employers can retain talent, facilitate employee movement between agencies, which needs to address issues such as flexibility and consistency of industrial conditions. Further, mobility optimises the use of existing capability across agencies to ensure agencies don't compete with each other for talent in the open market.

Moving services to a digital channel is an opportunity to join up services with other providers, and digital also makes gaps in service provision glaringly obvious

Government's should also develop a workforce transition and reskilling policy to ensure the transition from traditional, transactional services towards digital capabilities focussed first on skilling staff to uptake new roles, reducing redundancy costs and contingent labour-hire over ongoing employees — this is the topic of an upcoming paper I (Alan) am co-authoring, and we will share our conclusions here in Apolitical when it is published.

The quiet revolution of the life events approach

To pave the way for the life events approach to policymaking, we need to support an approach to service delivery that allows the public sector to: conceptualise problems differently; behave differently, continually adapting to a shifting environment; and react differently, becoming more tolerant of risk and ambiguity.

Life events require the public sector to design new policies that:

  • Simplify and create consistent industrial arrangements fit for a digitally enabled delivery culture;

  • Support the flexibility to respond to changing citizen demands around channels, service packaging and sharing personal information;

  • Enable systems and structures for increased innovation and productivity;

  • Create clear and modern expectations of work to ensure efficient delivery of services; and

  • Make the public sector an attractive and inclusive employer, offering conditions comparable with private sector employers.

As a result of the digital transformation sweeping our societies, we have a unique opportunity to make it much simpler for citizens to provide information to governments.

Moving services to a digital channel is an opportunity to join up services with other providers, and digital also makes gaps in service provision glaringly obvious. Putting the citizen at the centre of service delivery makes the citizen's costs (both financial and time) and services visible. Small changes to collaboration with other service providers can have profound benefits for citizens.

Life event journeys need measurements of satisfaction across the holistic event. These measures do not at present exist, although many are calling for them. — Alan Thorogood and Dr Kate Harrington

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