These issues, however, can be thwarted if decisions surrounding these projects are supported by data that is open, transparent, verifiable, and comparable. Access to open data can ultimately help unlock greater collaboration opportunities for future government infrastructure projects and result in more productive assets.

But look closely and often these potentially useful data sets can be unstructured, siloed, unsecure, unreliable, repetitive, managed through analogue processes or inaccessible by other government agencies. This can be the case as there is typically a focus of efforts on the physical assets and not the data, besides collating and using it to meet legal, reporting, procedural, and records keeping requirements.

When data is managed properly, it can deliver immense value to government agencies. Data can be used to support more informed decision-making, navigate the journey of resource allocation, improve the performance of existing infrastructure assets, and enable a step change in overall productivity and the delivery of future infrastructure projects. At the same time, it will ensure there is a timely handover of quality information to set operators up for success.

Neglecting to take advantage of valuable insights could negatively impact future efforts to adopt new technologies and the sector’s overall ability to procure, manage, exchange, and re-use data. Governments will also miss out on being able to strategically drive success of future high-value projects.

The responsibility for structured data collection and management cannot fall solely on a single entity, such as the government agency overseeing the infrastructure project. Rather, governments – across all levels – must collaborate collectively with industry and academia to understand the critical importance of valuing and managing data as an asset.

Developing and implementing a national data standard across all infrastructure assets will help foster a collaborative and unified approach to better data interoperability, as well as support the lifecycle of digital assets and digital twins for public infrastructure. The standard would also focus on uplifting data awareness, data literacy, data custodianship, data specification and data management.

Defining best practice for the Australian infrastructure sector on how to handle and organise data in the future will also eventually create a complete digital ecosystem, built on trusted and reliable data, that connects infrastructure agencies with their suppliers, stakeholders, and customers. It will also promote cross-agency cooperation, by actively supporting data sharing and digital collaboration, to re-invent how government agencies partner together to plan, deliver and operate public infrastructure.

The body of work of establishing a national data standard needs to be a led by a central government body, made up of members from all levels of government and other relevant stakeholders. This will require a concerted effort to identify opportunities to formalise the standards.

Without a national standard, the public infrastructure sector will continue to be challenged in data sharing, and eventually see Australia fall behind on a global scale. Working with relevant stakeholders and technology providers, such as SAP, to co-design and trial digital solutions, governments can directly address the challenge of current systems and support effective data management over the digital asset lifecycle.

Learn more in our that you can download for free.

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The taskforce also urged governments to more favourably evaluate proposals or tender bids from companies that adopt cyber security and other risk standards for telecommunications and the internet of things (IoT). Again, they know that without security being front of mind throughout the supply chain, vulnerabilities can creep in.

The taskforce’s recommendations for federal, state and local government agencies follows in the wake of the government moving to expand the label of “critical infrastructure” and create new security obligations and mandatory reporting for various public and private organisations via the draft legislation on Protecting Critical Infrastructure and Systems of National Significance.

These organisations could face steep penalties if they »ĺ´Ç˛Ô’t answer the call to become deeper partners with Australia’s government in all aspects of security, particularly cyber.

The government is clearly taking a more holistic approach to cyber security – and so are enterprises. But this gets tricky once you factor in cloud solutions (Public and Private), whose agility and scalability are increasingly necessary for organisations to capitalise on the value of rich data, streamline distributed operations, realise cost efficiencies and make better use of contemporary and emerging tech.

However, platforms like 51·çÁ÷HANA have evolved over a decade to help reconcile some of these tensions. Let’s take a look at how.

Can cloud solutions complicate security?

Regardless of architecture, security teams have to think carefully about who has access to data and how they’re accessing it.

Most recently, with on-premise architecture, it was a little more like a traditional building with an entrance and an exit. It’s a lot simpler to control security when you’re managing limited entry points. While many or even most cloud providers have robust security measures in place, cloud solutions do come with more entry points.

However, the security of those entry points differs based on public versus private cloud, as well as a wide variety of factors. For instance, within public cloud, there’s simply a greater number of side doors that require the same level of security. With private cloud, you control who has a door and what you let in and out.

That doesn’t mean organisations should sacrifice the benefits of all public cloud solutions – in fact, that might do more harm than good. It just means that security considerations need to govern any decision to bring new cloud extensions or providers into your environment. But ensuring scalable, enterprise-wide solutions is where things can get trickier.

Solutions that marry security with flexibility

In many organisations, elements of information are taken out of core systems and put into other data lakes, repositories or spreadsheets. The same piece of information is not only repeated in multiple areas but also with varying degrees of security applied to each of those different locations. If the weakest link determines the strength of the chain, then this approach means there are far more links whose strength is even harder to control or test.

Solutions like 51·çÁ÷HANA, whose 10-year evolution has always been anchored in protecting information and assets, can go a long way to resolving this sort of issue. As an enterprise-scale in-memory database designed to allow end users to have a conversation with their data, HANA caters to large volumes of data and diverse use across a broad user community. The way this can be leveraged for better security is simple: the more information you have in a secure, controlled, unified container, the easier it is to protect that information with centralised security measures.

HANA also enables real-time anonymisation of data displayed in SQL views. This means companies can analyse even the most sensitive and regulated of records – such as those in healthcare – while still protecting data and supporting compliance with privacy standards like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Solutions like Data Warehouse Cloud are the next evolution in further resolving tensions between innovation and security. It allows organisations to extend secure data environments to secure cloud solutions, combining features of HANA with the rigorous security frameworks provided by a range of hyper-scalers. So, even in complex multi-cloud systems, you can achieve a consistent enterprise-wide data management framework and connectivity to other systems, whether that be public, private, on-premise systems or ubiquitous data sources like IoT devices.

Changing how we think about cyber security

Various types of platforms and architectures can help achieve robust, enterprise-wide security frameworks without sacrificing the benefits of cloud. But strengthening your security posture will also depend on shifting mindsets and educating stakeholders about cyber security and management of risk. There are plenty of business imperatives for this already, but 2021 will see additional regulatory control and incentives as the federal government takes a bigger role in cyber security.

Two big mindset shifts need to happen across all of industry and critical infrastructure sectors. First, when it comes to IT systems and reporting environments, we too often test them based on how we expect them to perform. Particularly from a security perspective, we need an extra level of testing that focuses on what malicious actors want to do and what they’re going to try. It’s important to test systems based on how we want them to be used but also how we »ĺ´Ç˛Ô’t want them to be used.

Secondly, we often talk about how to collect data, store data and extend data. Cyber security compels us to ask: what are we going to do with this data? How will people use it? This is particularly crucial now that workers are less tethered to offices or corporate networks. It’s more important than ever to think about the potential usage of data and truly consider its security risk, ensuring that the device and solution set you’re using to present or extract that data is genuinely secure.

Major crises and national challenges in 2020 have reinforced the importance of collective success – when even one element struggles, so does the larger group. It’s an especially important principle in cyber security, where the tiniest vulnerability can open entire ecosystems to potential harm.

Yet the choice between security and innovation is a false one. Still, the topic is undeniably complex and demands ongoing discussion and thought.

So, what are you doing to protect your organisation while still pushing it forward?

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To find out how SAP’s Business Technology Platform can help meet your security needs, visit the .

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From COVID-19 testing to business stimulus programs, quarantine measures to training schemes, many citizens who may rarely be aware of the government’s role in our lives have become much more so over the months since the coronavirus pandemic hit Australia.

on the 51·çÁ÷Public Sector Homepage.

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The last article in our “Dealing with Disruption” series presented a conceptual architecture for Digital Nudges and demonstrated how it could be applied to improve crisis communications relating to a second-wave outbreak of the Coronavirus. In this companion piece, we seek to demonstrate that governments have ready access to the business applications and technologies required to deliver digital nudges today.

To achieve this, we’ll map our conceptual architecture to 51·çÁ÷products that are generally available and are already in use by governments around the world.

Conceptual Architecture

For reference, our conceptual architecture for digital nudges is depicted below.

Figure 1: A conceptual architecture for digital nudges.

Ěý51·çÁ÷Reference Architecture

Mapping our conceptual architecture to 51·çÁ÷products provides assurance that our conceptual architecture can be delivered in practice.

Figure 2: An example reference architecture for digital nudges.

Note that SAP’s will evolve over time, so this bill of materials should be considered representative rather than prescriptive.

• Predictive Analytics:
  • : enables organizations to analyze the behavior of customers and to generate risk scores and insights.
• Contextualization:
  • : enables organizations to use consent-based marketing and advanced data analytics to engage customers with pinpoint accuracy.
• Experience Management:
  • : enables organizations to gather experience data and combine it with operational data to close experience gaps.

• Analytics:
  • : enables organizations to provide a single source of truth to decision makers about the most important business metrics in real time.
    : enables organizations to combine BI, planning, predictive, and augmented analytics capabilities into one simple cloud environment.
• Intelligent Technologies:
  • : enables organizations to process distributed data and provide users with intelligent, relevant, and contextual insights with integration across the IT landscape.
    : enables organizations to define functions that can be called from within SQLScript procedures to perform analytic algorithms.
• Data Management:
  • : enables organizations to deliver a data warehouse in the cloud to unite multiple data sources in one solution.
    : enables organizations to accelerate data-driven, real-time decision-making and actions via a high-performance in-memory database.
• Application Development & Integration:
  • : enables organizations to model, implement, integrate, and monitor custom process applications and integration scenarios.
  • : enables organizations to accelerate integration, simplify development of application extensions, and expand business value with an open ecosystem.

In presenting this reference architecture, our intent has been to provide a worked example to demonstrate that governments have ready access to the business applications and technologies required to deliver digital nudges today, using business and technology components from SAP.

While other vendors might be able to offer some components of a digital nudge platform, we believe there is a benefit in sourcing the end-to-end solution from a single vendor.

To read more Public Sector content or find out more about SAP’s Public Sector customers and products, visit:

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Speaking as part of an online 51·çÁ÷event on Thursday, chief executive Lee Miezis said collating data into one place means relieving people of the need to “tell their story about their trauma over and over again”.

“They should be able to tell it once and all service providers can understand where that person is, but equally can understand what assistance that person has had in the past, what are some of the upcoming challenges or barriers that they’re perhaps going to have in their recovery journey so that we can then start proactively moving some of those barriers out of the way. To do that, data is absolutely key,” he said.

“We need to be able to bring together different sources of information, managed through privacy requirements to make sure that people are being treated with dignity through the process.”

He explained how part of that process has involved working with government and non-government organisations to generate relevant data points.

The need to access the right data has been particularly further highlighted by the current coronavirus environment, Miezis said, which has forced agency for a third of its existence to operate remotely.

“Those incidental conversations that you can have with people that give you valuable intelligence about where they’re at, where the community is at, what are some of the challenges, we’re missing out on that, so we’re even more reliant on data and raw information,” he said.

“I think this has forced organisations like mine, and I’m sure many others, to really think about how you bring data together in a fast, simple way to meet multiple purposes, but ultimately make sure the business that you run are targeted … we are absolutely reliant on good data for us to fulfil our organisational purposes.”

At the same time, the Victorian government agency has also had to battle with establishing an infrastructure that not only serves the organisation in the present, but in the long run too.

“We’ve had to stand up really quickly, leverage what we can across the Victorian government, in some cases bring disparate things together in the best way we can, as we build out the legacy systems that we will require as a permanent agency,” Miezis said.

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Join our second forum in theĚýĚývirtual series on August 6^th, and hear from Industry experts on the risk and opportunity impact our core industries now face. Ěý

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The online event attracted over 60 delegates from the Australian and New Zealand public services, representing all levels of government.

Measuring citizen engagement

Included in the agenda was an online poll, focussing on how agencies measure the citizen experience and how they respond to citizen feedback. While the sample size is small and not necessarily representative of citizen engagement across the public sector, the responses were intriguing and prompted valuable discussion.

As shown, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is the most popular approach for measuring the citizen experience among our respondents.

A characteristic of this approach is that it’s a transactional measurement – CSAT reflects satisfaction with a specific interaction or service.

By comparison, relational measurements like Net Promoter Score (NPS) are better approaches for longitudinal analysis. Admittedly, it can be difficult to apply standard NPS questions about customer loyalty within a public sector context, but it’s possible to adapt the questions to focus rather on citizen trust in government.

Another measurement worth considering isĚý, which reflects the ease (or difficulty) of doing business with the organisation. In the commercial world, CES is an excellent predictor of customer churn, and while this typically isn’t an issue for government, agencies are motivated to make their online services accessible and easy to use.

Since this was a multiple-choice question, it was possible for the survey participants to select more than one response, and possibly that’s the optimal approach… A sensible combination of these measurement tools can provide excellent insight into citizen satisfaction with service delivery, and the impact that experience has on citizen trust in government.

Using feedback

Encouragingly, all our respondents ask the citizen about their service delivery experiences.

Yet the responses to this question seem to align with the transactional measurement approach of CSAT.

Adopting a more relational approach, by embedding feedback throughout the process, can enable agencies to take proactive action and mitigate risks before they turn into problems.

We could argue the merits of all these responses – it’s important that agencies respond in a variety of ways to close-the-loop with citizens.

We’ve observed that citizen satisfaction is increasingly being included in agency service commitments, and it’s encouraging to see that this feedback is also being actively used to inform service design.

Untapped opportunity

There appears to be an untapped opportunity for data-driven policy development among our respondents, to truly close-the-loop on citizen feedback.

It’s interesting that more than half of respondents cited issues with motivating and engaging a representative sample of citizens as their biggest challenge in measuring citizen experience.

SIDG research intoĚý, suggests that a bi-directional view could help to increase participation in government surveys.

Two-way conversation

The rationale being that, if the citizen can see how the data the government is collecting will be used to serve them better, they will be more willing to engage and contribute.

Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery has always been a motivating factor for collecting citizen feedback, so the leading response here is not all that surprising.

It’s encouraging to see a relatively high percentage of our respondents wanting to focus on keeping citizens informed throughout the service delivery process.

Public sector best practice

Experience from leading government agencies suggests that providing transparency and traceability into government processes can improve the citizen’s perception of the timeliness of service delivery.

This might be because the citizen can see their case progressing through the system in real-time, giving them confidence that their feedback has been heard and is being actioned.

The SIDG would like to thank all respondents to our online poll, as well as our partners from the PSN and QUT. We found the participants’ responses to be very insightful and through-provoking, and we hope that sharing these reflections will further progress the conversation.

If you’d like to find out more about becoming a Responsive Government,Ěý.

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This could be the reason why trust in politicians and democracy has hit an all-time low at just under 41%, down sharply from 86% in 2007, according to research by the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis at the University of Canberra.

However, this decreasing trust has spurred Australian governments at the federal and state levels to turn their attention to increasing “digital empathy”, in an effort to arrest and reverse this decline.

To put it simply, digital empathy is about understanding the humans behind the data they generate, and responding to them in a more understanding and helpful way. It’s about learning why people make decisions and how they feel after interacting with government, not just analysing when and what they do.

Traditionally, governments haven’t been adept at embedding digital empathy into digital interactions with citizens. However, this is set to change, with governments realising the benefits of more closely listening to citizens.

The promise of digital empathy

According to SAP, all levels of government are looking at implementing digital empathy. They are looking at example being set by governments such as theĚý, which improved local services and increased citizen trust by implementing technology to identify key drivers in positive and negative experiences.

It’s encouraging to see there is now a groundswell towards full understanding of how to implement technologies, such as Qualtrics & Data Management platforms, to aid greater insights from the city’s resident program. The platform ensures that every member of the community has a clear and effective way to communicate feedback with city leaders.

This is because better insights are essential for delivering better government programs, as they enable governments to understand exactly how citizens are experiencing services so they can prioritise resources towards changes that will have the biggest impact for citizens.

In the past, governments have been slower than private sector to adopt tools that can understand users’ experience because, while customers can shop around at different businesses, when it comes to interactions with government agencies, there is no alternative for the consumer. Instead, citizens disengage.

Governments are now adopting new approaches by trying to partner with citizens. To do so effectively, governments needs to innately understand each citizen and their circumstances – what is typically known as a 360 view.

Why empathy? And why now?

Empathy is all about placing yourself in the shoes of another person to understand their predicament or specific set of circumstances. To achieve this, government agencies need to gain a better understanding of their citizens.

While the government knowing more about you may sound a little scary from the citizen’s perspective – as with any exchange of data, if the end-user can understand and see the benefits of what they are sharing and why, they will be supportive. Governments must show they are adapting to deliver services when and how citizens need it, rather than disappointing them with bureaucracy and inflexible processes.

The key is in finding the balance between rebuilding trust in governments and convincing constituents that digital empathy will deliver better services, not disenfranchise them.

It is a delicate balancing act between providing assistance to citizens and being perceived as overreaching, particularly given the diminishing trust in governments worldwide that has occurred in recent times.

To start with, there must be a commitment by government agencies to the ethical use of user data. One step that has been taken to do this is the imposition of limitations upon data that can be shared across government departments and agencies

Citizen-centricity

Citizen-centric thinking is the new paradigm. Previously, it was all about how the government wanted to conduct its business and meet compliance requirements, but now governments worldwide are focusing on customer-centricity, the life journey of their citizens and how they interact with government at its various touchpoints.

This new approach requires a lot more empathy than the previous model of service delivery, so that is why digital empathy – and the tools to facilitate it – is gaining traction in Australia and worldwide.

We are by no means in a position where this is ubiquitous within the public sector so there remains much work to be done in this journey. The tools are out there to facilitate this, so it’s up to the government agencies to act now and prioritise understanding their citizens wants and needs, as the first step to rebuilding trust.

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