The digital revolution is taking place at a time when local governments across Australia and New Zealand are being challenged by confusion around amalgamations, the potential for shared services models, rate capping and the infrastructure backlog. While the amalgamation process is still a hot potato in New South Wales, discussions around this topic are widespread across the country and councils are looking for ways to become fit for the future. Councils in all states are hence actively exploring opportunities with their neighbours to implement shared services as a way of delivering better services at a lower cost.
Moreover, with the consumerisation of citizens’ daily lives, input and engagement with all levels of government over digital channels is seen as increasingly critical. According to Deloitte, 15 million Australians use smartphones, with the entire nation glancing at their devices more than 440 million times a day.
Today’s citizens expect to conduct business and engage with their governments over instantaneous communication channels. At the same time, they believe that government decisions regarding development of local services should be collaborative, with over 90% of citizens claiming to want their governments to involve them in making decisions about service delivery, according to a University of Technology Sydney research report, ‘Local Government Matters’.
As a result, many local councils are beginning to look towards co-design as a collaborative approach to decision-making, with government and citizens working together to design services to ensure the most efficient use of resources.
Traditionally users may have been involved at the beginning, where their needs and issues were captured, and at the end, when the solution was being tested. The all-important design process was left to the experts. Today there is a more level playing field, where the service users are also recognised as experts and play an equally important role in the design process.
Technology also plays an important part in the process of creative co-design, with some councils now live-streaming their meetings. For others, co-design is being used in the design and implementation of new services. For example, Horowhenua District Council, 90 kilometres north of Wellington on New Zealand’s North Island, took an innovative co-design approach to its reporting procedures.
Through citizen collaboration and the innovative use of Civica’s Authority software solution, the council has been able to cut the time it takes to deliver its Land Information Memorandum (LIM) reports to stakeholders, while doubling its average LIM report output and cutting average turnaround time significantly. The council is required by legislation to deliver a LIM report within 10 working days but has upheld an average turnaround of reports in half a day for the past 18 months.
Horowhenua District Council adopted a co-design approach that involved a number of meetings and workshops between council representatives, community members and business executives to determine the outcome they wanted to achieve. The new procedure allows a staff member to generate the report that includes automated information available, rather than complete report creation manually.
However digital tools and their use as part of co-design remain limited in their use in this space. While there is a willingness to engage using technologies, there are still concerns about the extent of digital literacy on councils and throughout the community, as well as the possibilities for engaging all citizens, where digital divides remain apparent in many local areas.
Co-design should be an informed and guided process to ensure users generate ideas that will be workable as well as feasible. Co-design is about going beyond the minimum required consultation. While for some it may be risky, the ultimate reward is that government gets something that users want to use.
Ultimately, for government agencies to emerge as organisations effectively meeting the needs of their users/digital citizens, they must unreservedly embrace their users and put them at the centre of all that they do. For many councils and government agencies, this will require a significant shift in organisational mindset as well as cultural change.
