PD Newsletter #5: #Fail in Australia, movind capex to opex and Amazon's $1bn purchase

Welcome to the Public Digital newsletter. I'm @egawen on Twitter; observations from around the world welcome.

This week a mix of lessons from internet era organisations in banking and retail, and digital government developments.

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64 x #fail in a report by the Australian senate on digital services

The Australian senate sets out a “litany of failures” following an inquiry into digital services. It does not make pretty reading, describing a pattern of faults and broad systemic failure.

It is excoriating about the Robo-debt case study, describing it as "galling" that the “impact of the program on vulnerable people seemed to be an irrelevant in its design; irrelevant in its evaluation.” Despite this, the recommendations are weak on changing ways of working, resting on measuring user experience and training more IT project managers. Still well worth reading at least the case studies.

Meanwhile, the Australian Digital Transformation Agency lost another CEO last week with longstanding public servant Randall Brugeaud to take over the role.

[Summary in the Mandarin | Full senate report]

“The pharmacy world is much more complex than just delivering certain pills”

I feel like we've seen this play out before. Amazon has bought the undoubtedly brilliant PillPack, for just under $1bn. Walgreens Boots Alliance, CVS Health and Rite Aid collectively lost $11 billion in market value in response. On a post-earnings call, Walgreens boss said "we are not particularly worried”.

[Techcrunch]

How to spend smarter and deliver better

James Stewart and Manj Kalar consider how government can spend money more effectively on digital technology. The top recommendation is to reallocate capital expenditure to operating expenditure. A number of countries are actively considering how this could be done but it's harder than it sounds, and to my knowledge no-one has got it right yet. It will be a step beyond agile business cases when they do.

[Published by the Amazon Web Services Institute | James is a Partner at Public Digital; this paper was written in his capacity as an independent consultant.]

Challenger bank Monzo acts with speed and transparency

Culture isn't what you say, it's what you do, and here is a great case study on how internet era organisations can act with speed and gain customer trust through transparency. After detecting a fraudulent pattern relating to Ticketmaster, Monzo proactively replaced 6000 cards to customers and worked with Ticketmaster to provide them evidence of the breech. They've subsequently published a clear and helpful account of what happened.

[Monzo]

(Another) good week for GOV.UK

I try to keep this newsletter as broad as possible, but there are a couple of really brilliant pieces of work from the UK’s Government Digital Service that are well worth your time.

The launch of the GOV.UK design system. Things to like: clear and open guidance on how to contribute, inclusion of notes on user research and the guidance on plain English is 🔥(it is about the code, but it’s also about the context).
On building the GOV.UK of the future. This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the power (and responsibility) of running a single website for all central government services and information; why it’s more than just a website, and how the team continue to adapt to serve user needs.

5 interesting things from around the world 🌏

1
Proving again that China is racing ahead. Alibaba has helped over a million small shops become digitised stores, buying goods through Alibaba’s platform and paying using it’s app. Alibaba, Tencent and JD.com are moving far more aggressively than their Western competitors into retail as a service, and locking down competition at the same time. Axios.

2
Jamaica are forming a central authority for ICT, planning to bring in a government wide secure network, consolidated voice communication and email systems. They need to know that the internet is ‘ok’ and that all these things are commodity services. Jamaica Observer

3Fiji launches a Digital FijiApp, offering two services, my-Feedback Fiji and Directory-At-Gov. I’d love to point them to Tom’s classic we’re not appy blog post and Lou Downe’s ‘services are verbs not nouns' work. Fiji times
4Work begins in Kolkata, India to make websites of all districts “similar”, to make it easier for users to access information. Interesting to see the trickle down effect of GOV.UK. But a core benefit of a single domain is having a single authoritative source of truth, so it will difficult for these efforts to have success without shutting off existing websites, and a mandate to rewrite content. Millennium Post
5
To listen to: HBR Ideacast talks to Bhaskar Chakravorti about India’s unprecedented demonetization move in 2016. Fascinating insight into the economic, cultural and operational impacts. HBR

News from Public Digital

On the PD blog: Earlier this month, we partnered with digital HKS to convene digital services units from around the world; Giles writes about Platforms, agile, trust, teams and werewolves.

Some books have found a good home: I don't know what Steve is up to here, but I'm delighted Emily was there to share it with us.

Our book, Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy is Delivery is in stock. It’s available to buy now direct from the publisher, from Amazon, or Book Depository.