If you've spent any time working in IT within or around the Australian Government, you've probably heard about the Digital Service Standard, administered by the Australian Government's Digital Transformation Agency (DTA). But what does the Digital Service Standard really mean for those who work in/around government today?
A staff member of the DTA once told me that to them the Digital Service Standard represents permission for government to work in a new and different way (well, new and different to government perhaps). In large part, it's permission for government to take inspiration from agile delivery principles and start-up culture in aid of providing better services to citizens. In the Australian Public Service however, this is more easily said than done as a large part of agile delivery and start-up culture is predicated on the assumption that the groups and organisations involved will be small and nimble, two adjectives that typically do not apply to government agencies. This was but one topic that I discussed with DTA representatives at a field trip taken earlier this year to the Canberra DTA office to observe a Digital Service Standard assessment for a government service known as BloodNet, managed by the National Blood Authority.
