Despite the Innovation agenda of Australia’s Federal Government, the digital services provided by the Government actually teach organizations more about how NOT to do digital rather than serving as a shining example..
Last Sunday, the Australian Tax Office’s website was down for the entire day. Apparently this was for scheduled maintenance. No backup site was available, and despite the fact that the majority of the site is static content for informational purposes, the outage was total. No message was given to indicate the duration of the outage. Continually trying to access the site throughout the day, my last attempt was at 8pm, with the site still not available. (Note: Despite the above message, the ATO service was also unavailable via MyGov)
The ATO’s business portal, allowing companies the ability to log in to complete their Business Activity Statement (BAS) is also problematic. It relies on a clumsy certificate based authentication, which makes it difficult to access the portal from different computers. Anyone trying to access the portal from a Mac computer is in for a world of pain. A long thread on Whirlpool lists over four years of frustrated Mac users trying to access the system. Hint: To make it work, you actually have to set your java settings to “run in unsafe mode”.
And then of course there’s Census 2016. The Australian Government achieved global headlines for all the wrong reasons with their Digital approach to collecting the census on August 9. Various expert assessments of the debacle, such as a report by the University of Wollongong and the blog of security commentator Patrick Gray, outline the multiple errors made both in the planning and the execution of the census.
So what can we learn from the Australian Government’s mistakes?
Firstly, user experiences and ease of use are vital for any digital service. The appropriate balance between usability on the one hand and security & privacy on the other hand needs to be found. A more successful example from the Australian government is MyGov, where authentication Is managed by two factor authentication: a user defined password, and a one-off token sent via SMS to the user at login time. This is simple to use and portable, while remaining secure and private.
Secondly, digital services need to be available as close as possible to 24×7. Use of mirrored production environments, allowing rolling updates rather than outages, should be a standard technique. Similarly, continuous integration should replace major upgrades, minimizing the impact of each update and the corresponding interruption required.
Thirdly, when things go wrong, the provider of the Digital Services needs to be on the front foot, identifying the issue and providing reassurance. The contradictory messages from the ABS and the responsible Minister in the 24 hours following the census debacle served to add to customers’ anxiety and further reduce trust in the platform.
Digital access to services is increasingly the way of the future. The successful digital service provider can learn a lot by reviewing the Australian Government’s misadventures.