Late 1990s: Single Entry Point (or not) and ePayments

In the late 1990s, I led one of Australia’s first eBusiness projects at the State Revenue Office (SRO) of Victoria with the implementation of epayments and the investigation of the impact of credit card merchant fees which would be associated with epayments. It was also seen as one of the first projects of its kind in government worldwide. The State of Victoria was a global leader in government online at the time, feted by Bill Gates himself in his 1999 book ‘Business At the Speed of Thought’.

The SRO eBusiness Project was a very significant change management exercise for the whole organisation, as well as millions of businesses and individuals interacting with the SRO. I also led the strategic intelligence function and revenue forecasting.

I have been on the ground with data and digital right from the early days of the Internet and all the iterations of ‘government online’, ‘eGovernment’ and what is now known a ‘digital government’.

The significance of this project is that it was the first major opportunity for real change since PC's were first on desks. At the time, there was one computer terminal in the Agency with access to the Internet. Things were about to change big time, for everyone.

The eBusiness Project was recognised as one of the world’s first successful eBusiness projects, and was developed into a case study for an international executive program managed by the Melbourne Business School and INSEAD (France). I had studied my MBA at the Melbourne Business School, specialising in innovation, technology strategy and ecommerce, and was invited to present on the SRO eBusiness Project. I had studied under Professor Peter Weill who went on to become Senior Research Scientist & Chairman, Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) MIT Sloan School in Boston.

Here’s the Presentation

The actual Powerpoint presentation saved as PDF can be found 👉 here.

Other presentations on the SRO eBusiness project I gave, can be found here 👉 (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4) and👉 here.

The various presentations cover varying levels of detail, with the larger documents in colour broken into parts.

My Melbourne Business School PDF presentation contains all my talking notes - bearing in mind this presentation was TWENTY-SIX years ago.

TWENTY-SIX YEARS AGO. What do you notice?

Browsing through the presentations and notes, what do you notice?

➡️ This was not an ‘IT’ project.

➡️ This was a whole of organisation project, focused on the customer; on choice of channel; and on service delivery transformation.

➡️ We planned for multi-lingual help focussing on customer group needs and disability access.

➡️ I have always warned against the simplistic ‘single entry point’ concept as such a concept does not reflect reality and restricts customer choice. See my discussion below in Commentary.

➡️ Included in the service delivery channel options was TELEVISION. ALWAYS look and plan over the horizon.

➡️ Digital Credentials, even in the earliest days of online service delivery, was seen as a critical element, including the ‘transferability’ of Digital Credentials. Digital Credentials are not the same as Digital Identity.

➡️ From the outset, there was an emphasis on data protection and privacy, and a focus on the need for codes of conduct.

➡️ Payments have planning implications for the whole organisation: communication; compliance; analytics; staff training; and legal. And still do. Payments in any organisation affects the WHOLE organisation.

➡️ Methodologies were critical. There was no guesswork. Transaction audit and analysis was used to inform organisational priority as to which transactions go online, to deliver greatest benefit.

Critical Lessons

Experience the ‘view from the queue’ - wherever the queue is. And this can only be done via co-design.

Business value from electronic service delivery comes from process re-design and process elimination - not from technology investment. Do not automate that which should not be there in the first place or is redundant. Otherwise digital complexity and digital red tape will fester. Just look at the current state of any government (or health provider) website, and the cesspit of ‘forms’.

Change management, workforce planning, and training are integral to customer service standards and compliance.

Communication and marketing are critical to managing expectations and responding to unforeseen demand and other unforeseen issues.

Commentary

This project was successfully delivered by an internal multidisciplinary team of analysts, technologists, legal, and the core SRO business function of revenue collection, overseen by organisational governance.

We knew the business. There were no consultants. There was no vested interests or conflicts of interest. There was certainly no land and expand.

These lessons from TWENTY-SIX years ago, are TIMELESS and UNIVERSAL. Together, these show what was possible and achieved in a relatively short period of time, with a small group of knowledgeable people, doing something new that hadn’t been done before.

But for many reasons, these lessons have not been learned nor applied. In my opinion, this is due to the gutting of public sector capability over these many decades: the deskilling; the loss of the appetite and confidence to do new and big things that haven’t been done before; and the loss of the capability to build things. And because we have lost the capability to build things, we have also lost the capability to fix things.

In my experience and in my opinion, the most serious capability deficit confronting public sectors, is the profound absence of any capability to understand complex systems. This is the world we live in, the world of complex systems, and the public sector has utterly and wilfully abandoned the skills fundamental to complex systems. Policy cannot be developed nor service delivery designed and operationalised without complex systems capability.

But that does not mean that servicing systems should be complex: quite the opposite. Understand complex systems for the purpose of achieving simplicity.

Instead, the public sectors have been duped into the fallacy that such skills are not necessary in the ‘digital age’. We simply become coordinators and procurers - and not very good ones at that. The lure of technology marketed by multinational corporations and helpfully industrialised and sold by consulting firms promoting that anything can and should be automated; the lure that we don’t really have to worry about the detail, the knowledge of complex systems and how things actually work.

I see these EXACT same issues at the NDIS NDIA. And the cost now is not just in terms of inefficiency, uncontrolled cost, and grotesquely bloated bureaucracies (all the things that the ‘digital era’ was supposed to sort out). The horrific cost is now measured in human life. Can it get any worse?

As the year 2000 loomed and the tech industry boomed, with my hands-on service delivery track record and experience in complex systems, I would be headhunted to consulting - as evidenced by the branding of one of my SRO eBusiness presentations - and then headhunted to Microsoft Corporate Headquarters as the Worldwide Executive Director Public Services and eGovernment. But the urge and attraction to actually build something and lead transformation would soon see me back in action in the business of building and delivery. Read more in the About Me section on my website.

But let’s not overlook the impact of the fallacies of the digital age. And there are many: here’s the prime fallacy.

My perspective on the fallacy of the concept of a ‘single entry point’ might seem at odds with my experience having salvaged and led the Business Entry Point (business.gov.au) for five years. In reality, the concept of operations of the BEP is exactly as depicted in the above diagram, from my SRO presentation from years prior. Not ‘one’ entry point - or a ‘single’ entry point - but a preferred entry point, part of a complex system, not a honey pot for cyber crooks or a servicing choke point. And that is why the BEP has been successful for almost all those 26 years.

That is also why I have long advocated against MyGov as a ‘centre point’ of digital government, and advised against this to many Parliamentary Inquiries. MyGov has been found to have very serious cyber security defects - the weakest link is at the centre - the very risk I and others have been warning about for many years.

What enables fallacies such as the single entry point - and ‘digital identity’ - to take hold, is the vacuum of complex system thinking capability in public sectors.

These complex systems are the very systems of society.

Instead, what now occupies this space which public sectors have vacated, is the duopoly of technology platforms and consulting behemoths. This is not just about outsourcing. With the loss of complex systems capability, public sectors no longer have the capability to think, act, build things and fix things.

The evidence of this is everywhere. Risk is no longer understood - the Australian Public Service flatters itself that it is risk adverse. But to be risk adverse - or more correctly, to make an informed statement on any risk dimension - necessitates understanding risk in the first place, and that can only happen with a mature complex systems capability.

If the cost of the decay of the public sector capability and knowledge of complex systems can now be seen in loss of life due to defective systems and unlawful systems, as in the case of the NDIA NDIS. How much worse can things get?

What happened in 1999 and Y2K was not what it seemed. The sigh of relief on 1 Jan 2000 hid something else happening simultaneously. The race to go online fuelled global technology and consulting behemoths to sell the ultimate fallacy to governments:

And so it began. The inevitable decay in complex systems capability in public sectors. And into this capability abyss, public sectors now sleep walk from digital government to AI government - encouraged every step of the way by the sticky hand of the technology and consulting behemoths.

What we are witnessing goes far beyond inflated bloated bureaucracies, inefficiencies, data loss, the incapacity to do analysis, and self-congratulatory risk aversion. Surely there can be no greater risk, than risk to life and death occurring as a result of defective systems. We saw this with RoboDebt and now at far greater scale with RoboNDIS.

This retrospective back to 1999 is not really about the SRO eBusiness Project, as proud as I am of what the team achieved. It shows what was possible and achievable in a relatively short period of time, with a small group of knowledgeable people, doing something new that hadn’t been done before.

This retrospective affords more than a look back. It helps get inside the questions: what happened, why have the lessons not been applied after 26 years, and why the out of control complexity of government service delivery (and healthcare I might add) adversely affecting the lives of every citizen.

This is not about the admiration of complexity.

Rather, this retrospective signals the loss of capability to understand complex systems in order to achieve something harder. Simplicity.

Flashback 1999: When Complex Systems Capability Started to Decay