What if everything you’d written on a topic over the last decade could be poured into an AI that interacts with you to develop and explore new insights and ideas? This morning I’ve started testing our proof of concept ‘digital brain’, which has read, absorbed and contextualised everything I’ve written in my eGov.AU blog since…
One reason I’ve posted less frequently in this blog over the last few years is that, frankly, digital in government has become boring. Digital is now well-embedded in virtually every agency and council at every level of government in Australia and New Zealand, and mobile & online have now been the primary channels for citizens…
There’s a lot of evidence available now that the emotional tone of the messaging that people are exposed to on social media goes on to affect their mood, posting behaviour, and aspects of their health and actions. A study by Facebook and Cornell University in 2012 (published in 2014) that involved modifying the emotional valance of…
There’s been enormous coverage of the new Centrelink debt letters process, whereby the Department of Human Services has automated the process of matching data from the ATO and Centrelink to try to find overpayments (but not underpayments) in welfare benefits to Australia. The automation has involved removing human quality assurance steps, which has led to…
A few months ago I interviewed with Andrew Ramsden of AlphaTransform, who has spent the last year capturing the thoughts of digital leaders around Australia (he also has a book in the works). He’s now published the interview as Episode 16 in his Alpha Geek Podcast – which is definitely worth checking out. You can…
I wrote this post in response to a LinkedIn conversation around this article, Digital government could become just more cost cutting, warns Internet Australia – which should be read first for context. Digital transformation should never focus on the digital, it’s about transformation. Digital is a toolset and has opened new doors to how services and…
Growth of the Chief Digital Officer (CDO) role has been incredibly rapid over the last few year, reflecting the increasing importance of technology to organisational success and survival. However not all CDO roles are created equal, with enormous variation in their responsibilities, resourcing and capability to generate change, in the form of digital transformation, in…
On the 25th August the Department of Finance in Canberra announced that its bold experiment in providing a central website infrastructure for agencies, Govspace, was coming to an end after almost seven years. I still remember feeling excited at the original launch of Govspace. At the time I was working in the Department of Health as…
I think it is now safe to say that, technically at least, #CensusFail has peaked, with the ABS and IBM successfully restoring most access for the Census 2016 site. While there are still scattered reports of failures, not recognizing JavaScript is turned on, issues in some browsers and variable levels of access for people with…
Australia’s Productivity Commission has just released it’s report on “Digital Disruption: What do governments need to do?“. It’s not too long a read. The key findings fit into a few pages, and provides enough of a helicopter view to get a clear view of the direction the Productivity Commission believes agencies should take. There’s implications…
This archive mirrors the original eGov AU blog — Craig’s professional commentary on AI, digital government and technology in public life, running since 2006.
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