Paul Shetler’s perspective on UK, US and Australian government digital transformation

Paul Shetler talks exclusively to diginomica about the difficulties that successive governments in the US, UK and Australia face as they attempt digital transformation projects.

“You can’t Kumbaya your way through this,” smiles Paul Shetler as he relaxes in a cafe in Sydney’s fashionable Potts Point while talking about the challenges of managing a government’s digital transformation.

Shetler was talking exclusively to diginomica about what he learned during his 16 month tenure at Australia’s Digital Transformation Office and the UK’s Government Digital Service before that. He also offered some views on the state of digital transformation in the US. Be warned – his views make for uncomfortable reading.

Before being attracted Down Under by the then-newly installed Turnbull government to head its digital transformation agency, Shetler had worked for Microsoft and Oracle before becoming the UK Ministry of Justice’s Chief Digital Officer and then a director of the GDS.

Despite recent setbacks for the UK’s GDS, Shetler is upbeat about the work done in the UK and how the organisation identified  and worked around structural problems and digital roadblocks within government.

In terms of the UK, GDS really have done a great job. If hadn’t been for GDS we wouldn’t be having the conversation we’re having in Australia today, much less in New Zealand, the United States and other countries. An awful lot of the basic ideas on how you fix government IT by looking at structural reasons for behaviour rather than just saying ‘let’s make a nicer interface’, they were really good at identifying those things.

While the UK was leading the government digital transformation wave in the English speaking world, Shetler says New Zealand offers lessons in the design of technology led public service delivery.

If you go to New Zealand you’ll see they’ve been doing a lot of great thinking – it really influenced us in Australia on user journeys across governments, where you want to get something done that goes across agencies. Let’s look from the standpoint of the end user; the end user wants to send a child to school, to emigrate to New Zealand or to open up a business. What do they need to do and how can we map it out for them. The problem in New Zealand is that the team has no authority, all they can do is propose and it depends upon other people saying ‘oh, that’s a great idea’ although there’s been a lot of great design thinking coming out of there and it difficult for that being translated into practice.

While the experiences in New Zealand and the UK are interesting, Shetler agrees with Oracle’s Mark Hurd that the United States has suffered from a lack of digital leadership  and that currently presents the biggest opportunity for reinvention as a new Administration takes office.

The US right now is a mess, they don’t really have a digital strategy, I do think the new administration is more likely to do something big to fix things than perhaps the Obama Administration was, because they are talking about national infrastructure. If you to the United States it’s shocking, the physical level infrastructure is falling apart and on a digital level things are pretty much the same, if you look at the government websites many of them look like they are from the 1990s and they all look and act differently. They are very much like the UK before Britain started the digital transformation and they’ve had several years to fix it but there’s been no concerted effort because no-one really owns it. The GSDS which operates out of the White House gets really great talent in to do fix something but they don’t have the authority across the government. They also have 18F who operate on a cost recovery basis who act like an internal consultancy… they have some extremely talented people there and we’ve learned quite a bit from them. But there’s no vision or strategy that guides it all.