Public Service    Senior Management Conference     Wellington, 15 October 1998         Keynote Address by  Rebekah Burton Deputy Secretary, Department of Premier and Cabinet Tasmania, Australia

Rebekah Burton is the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet for the Tasmanian State Government. She holds responsibility for information management policy across government and is Chair of the governing boards of two of the major service delivery initiatives of the Tasmanian Government, Service Tasmania and the outsourced Wide Area Network. Prior to joining the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Rebekah was General Manager of Tasmania Development and Resources. Rebekah’s background in Economic Development covers a broad range of industry, from aluminium smelters to the development of the arts. She holds a degree in Economics (Hons) from the University of Tasmania.

Tasmania: The Information Economy - Transforming Government and the Community in a Small Regional Economy

Transformations

We are living through a transformation in the way we work, interact and play – the sort of transformation that has only occurred every few hundred years in Western history. A similar transformation commenced with the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press in the 1450s. Another transformation started in 1776 – the year of the American Revolution and the year Watt’s steam engine was perfected. The global transformation we are experiencing probably commenced with the invention of the computer around 1950. The momentum of the information age has been building since that time. Let’s not forget there have been many false prophets – remember those predictions of a paperless office.

The hallmark of all previous transformations has been the massive change that takes place. Change in the social, economic and political environment so dramatic that the children of the change just can’t imagine what the world was like for their grandparents or even their parents. Does this sound familiar? The new era of social and commercial interaction, enabled by information technology, has come to be called the information economy. My presentation focuses on the information economy and the opportunities it creates for policy makers, public servants and communities. I will be making only passing reference to the ‘T’ in IT.

The Internet is only one of many information-based systems which provide new and more powerful enablers. However, the speed of light growth in Internet use is the best indicator yet of the pace of the change. Did you know that fewer than 40 million people were connected to the Internet in 1996? By the end of 1997, there were more than 100 million net users. On present trends, the Clinton administration is forecasting one billion people will be connected by 2002. Traffic on the Internet has been doubling every 100 days. Compare the current pace of change to the spread of the other technologies that have shaped the 20th century. It took nearly 40 years for radio to achieve 50 million listeners and about 13 years for TV to achieve the same audience.

Australia too has been experiencing dramatic growth. An ABS survey in May this year found that three million Australians had used the Internet in the previous 12 months. That’s about 17 per cent of the total population, accessing from home, work and educational institutions. Usage has increased 400 per cent in two years.

No doubt the New Zealand experience is the same. Sometimes it’s a bit like sitting in the eye of a storm. There is the uncanny sensation that nothing is moving – but that things just beyond reach are changing, shifting at breakneck speed. One thing is certain; the implications for Government and governance are immediate and breathtaking. The OECD has characterised the change which is occurring as Governance in Transition.

‘The role of government is evolving in OECD countries in response to fundamental changes in economies and societies. In adjusting to these new demands and conditions, OECD countries are reviewing and reforming systems of public management. They are reconsidering how government relates to citizens and enterprises, how best to ensure provision of public services and how to define the inherent functions that government must perform. In short they are deeply concerned with maintaining the capacity to govern in the face of great change.’

One of the key issues which is emerging is the switch away from government as purely a deliverer of services to a more citizen focused approach. With citizen demand more diversified and sophisticated than ever before, governments are being challenged on their ability to deal with stubborn social problems. The ready availability of more and better performance information is placing ever greater pressure on national and sub-national governments to deliver the goods. Doing that is made increasingly difficult in the face of a seemingly infinite set of citizen demands on finite public resources.

Public policy making is under intense scrutiny. People are not content to just let the government govern. They do want to know the ins and outs of what goes on. Political leadership is about a successful interface with electors and dissemination of information determines popular support. Loss of that support threatens the consent to govern.

The plethora of information-based systems means greater access by government to citizens via a variety of channels – it runs both ways though. Information-based systems ensure that citizens have a variety of mechanisms to provide input to or scrutinise government activity. That scrutiny by the community can be like a blowtorch to the belly, especially if things aren’t going well. Just ask Bill Clinton.

I don’t need to go into detail for this audience on the challenges ahead. You all face them every day in running your agency or operation - cost effectiveness, flexibility, devolved authority, target setting, accountability, customer focus, outputs outcomes. I’m beginning to sound like a consultant or worse someone from the Treasury! Instead, I want to concentrate on the opportunities the information economy creates for government and the community. I’ll talk a bit about the public policy imperative to use the information economy as a springboard to empower communities. I’ll go through some examples that I hope will clarify the sorts of things that are immediately possible, things that we are doing in Tasmania now.

Public Servants as Knowledge Workers

A key theme I want to pursue is the way in which the information economy is leading to public servants becoming knowledge workers. Definitions abound, but by a knowledge worker, I mean someone who knows more about their job than anyone else in the organisation. Now don’t get me wrong - I’m not standing up here and telling you that it’s only with the coming of the information economy that public servants can be characterised as knowledge workers.

A scribe in Ancient Egypt using a stylus to record tribute to the government of the day on a papyrus roll was turning information into knowledge. But 3000 years ago, being a knowledge worker depended on access to a strictly limited set of skills and to the right information. A modern day equivalent of the Egyptian scribe would be a professional like an engineer - highly trained, technically oriented and narrowly focused (apologies to all those engineers out there).

What is different now is that information-based systems are enabling employees at the operational level – the process workers - to become knowledge workers. So the revolution is occurring through the ranks and is not just restricted to the apex of the hierarchical pyramid.

This is happening principally because the enabling information-based systems are ubiquitous. Access may not be universal, but the pressures for greater efficiency within government I talked about earlier have led to a communication explosion – whether it is phone networks, Integrated Voice Response technology, video conferencing or web based communications. In public sectors everywhere, managers dissatisfied with incremental improvements are re-engineering processes to deliver the sorts of efficiency and effectiveness gains that government and the community expect.

The old order of data being transformed into information and then to knowledge through a continuous feedback loop based on experience is being turned on its head. Increasingly, knowledge can be transformed into information and sent through computer and communication networks which are widely accessible. For both the public and private sectors, the costs of acquiring knowledge are lower, barriers to entry are being demolished, natural monopolies are evaporating and new products and services are emerging. The spread and growth of knowledge actually underpin the information economy. In his book Post Capitalist Society Drucker says it best: ‘The basic economic resource is no longer capital or labour. It is and will be knowledge.’

So much for theory and assertions. In the time remaining I will tell you a bit about where I come from. That will help explain why a bureaucrat from the state of Tasmania is here talking about the information economy. I will then give you some concrete examples of our experience of transforming government and the community in a small, isolated regional economy.

Tasmania Today

Tasmania is an intensely beautiful place. One of the first and probably most insightful economic analysts of the Tasmanian economy, Sir Bede Callaghan wrote in 1977, ‘Tasmania is small. Tasmania is beautiful. Tasmania is economically vulnerable.’ It has less than half a million people and the most decentralised population in Australia. As a group of islands, nowhere in the state is more than 150 kilometres from the sea. The air is so clean it is monitored as a benchmark for pollution across the world. Over 40 per cent of the state is protected in national parks and other reserves, and nearly half the state is forest which thrives in a moderate temperate climate. The Tasmanian identity is an island identity. We draw strength from our isolation and protection from our physical separation. But Bass Strait is also our weakness. It is not simply an economic barrier but, too often, an excuse to avoid the hard decisions. It sometimes allows us to accept comfortable myths … not to reinforce our resolve but to try to shield ourselves from reality.

It seems to me you New Zealanders overcame this insular, silo approach quite some time ago – but for Tasmania it persists. Our history has been shaped by contrasts. Mark Twain said, ‘How beautiful is the whole region, for form, and grouping, and opulence and freshness of foliage, and variety of colour …’

And it was in this paradise that the yellow-liveried convicts were landed, and the corps-bandits quartered, and the wanton slaughter of the kangaroo-chasing black innocents consummated. Tasmania had the most feared and brutal penal settlements in Australia. On the other hand this perception of Tasmania’s great beauty is still strongly felt. The noted Los Angeles photographer Arthur Rosenfeld said recently, ‘A person can disappear in beauty like this.’ But beauty is not enough.

Around the world and across Australia, sub-national and regional economies are struggling. They’re struggling with economic decline as old industries which have been the mainstay of local employment, sometimes for generations of workers, simply pack up and leave. They’re struggling with challenges to their social fabric, to the sense of community which has always defined their difference from the big cities and they’re struggling with change which is more pervasive and occurring much faster than has historically been the norm except in association with war and revolution. Tasmania is such an economy.

As with many regional communities, Tasmania’s economy has been based on a set of traditional industries: mining, forestry, fishing, agriculture and energy intensive resource processing. Many of our traditional industries provide considerable wealth but are limited in their capacity to grow. Some, like forestry and high value agriculture have been revitalised and are growing strongly. New ways of using the state’s natural resources have emerged like aquaculture and nature based tourism, while others such as the construction of very large passenger catamarans echo the state’s maritime heritage. But it’s not enough.

Traditional industries are closing at an accelerating rate, the victims of structural change in the Australian economy and a consequent lack of long-term investment. While this is being felt in regional communities across Australia, Tasmania is unique amongst the states because it is a purely regional economy. It lacks the noise and drive created by a dominant capital city.

The pace is slower where I come from. In contrast to the urban growth centres of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, the Tasmanian economy has no capital city hub, it is fragile and vulnerable to fluctuations in world markets. It is commodity focused and is more like rural and regional areas of Victoria and New South Wales than the major cities. For example, take up of technology is much lower in Tasmania than in the states with capital city economies. Tasmania has the highest unemployment and the lowest average income of any state. Its public finances are under continuing strain to provide the level of services that the community expects as Australian citizens. Too many of the best and brightest of its young people leave the state to find work. The solutions are just not working.

It is quite apparent that regional economies have no choice. Tasmania has no choice. There is no economic rule that says a community must share in the increased wealth which the information economy is creating. The continued existence and strength of a community still depends on its ability to adapt. The status quo is unacceptable in regional economies because it offers no future. A community that rejects change and chooses the past will stagnate and decline.

The public policy objective must be to support this process of transformation. This requires policy responses that recognise and make use of the emergence of information as the new commodity of value and the profound economic and social effects of participation in the information economy.

Participation does enable, almost uniquely amongst the available policy choices, a set of new solutions for regional communities. It does this by:

-    addressing economic decline through access to new location independent industries and by reducing problems of size and market access

-   strengthening the social fabric of small communities by providing them with renewed choice - options for access to services, information and goods

-   providing a vehicle to allow communities to gain some control over the very forces of change that it creates

-   allowing Government to show leadership by adopting information-based systems to improve its own business practices and to improve the delivery of services to its citizens. As both a lead user and customer, Government can act as a catalyst for change - encouraging uptake of information-based systems by businesses and the community, and

-   not only doing new things but also improving and revitalising what is already there.

New Approaches to Service Delivery

To help transform how Tasmanians live, we have emphasised new approaches to service delivery. Enhanced service delivery in areas such as policing provides an important early opportunity for Government to be seen to be responding to community concerns and focusing on customer service. Tasmania, despite its small size and isolation, is experiencing all the same social problems of the larger Australian states. While the incidence of crimes of violence is much lower than for the nation as a whole, property crimes have become increasingly common. Hamstrung by funding constraints but increasingly aware of the necessity to re-engineer processes to ensure more policing, Tasmania Police embarked on Project Baton - a multi year strategy to improve policing outcomes for the Tasmanian community. At the heart of Baton has been the implementation of information-based systems to improve communications, speed up response times and increase crime clean up rates.

As part of a review of internal processes, Police discovered that paper based systems were leading to a lag of up to 15 days between initial crime reporting and inclusion in crime databases. The lag for stolen motor vehicle reports was five days. Naturally enough clean up rates and perceptions of quality of service by customers were abysmal. By re-engineering processes, creating one centralised 24 hour call centre for the state and putting in place a crime management strategy based on timely information police can spend more time policing and victims get better service including follow up. While it is early days, the statistics are showing a significant improvement in crime clean up.

Previously employed as ‘paper shufflers’ in the old long-winded internal crime reporting process, call centre operators now provide a valuable quality assurance role to police officers providing verbal crime reports. The Deputy Commissioner for Police describes them as adding real value to the policing process.

A lack of access to services is a barrier to economic development and an inclusive social policy. Government can build confidence amongst the community that alternative means of delivery do work by successfully delivering its own services using the new technologies.

Tasmania has established a program to provide a single coordinated approach to government service delivery aimed at the ordinary day to day transactions between government and its customers. Typically, customers who want to conduct transactions with government are confronted with the need to deal with many different organisations, usually at different locations, and to provide the same information many times over. They often don’t know where to go first. The Service Tasmania initiative is designed to allow customers to conduct all over the counter transactions electronically and at one stop government shops. It provides a comprehensive service across all government agencies.

The government has not created a new organisation to undertake this activity but used telecommunications to glue together the activities of all its agencies. We have adopted a common approach across all service delivery channels whether they are face to face or electronic. So, as far as is practicable, someone undertaking a transaction through an electronic channel will have the same experience and range of options as a customer at a Service Tasmania shop. Using telecommunications to bind together the services in the physical channel speeds the introduction of electronic services and means that shops in rural and urban areas can offer the same comprehensive range of transactions.

Service Tasmania is currently offering over 150 different transactions and a huge number of information services through its shops. Customers conduct all their transactions with one person at one counter. By December there will be 25 shops throughout Tasmania.

People staffing these shops are my best example of new public sector knowledge workers. Previously counter staff for a variety of different agencies which ran separate shopfronts to collect fees and fines, the Service Tasmania staff now provide services and information across the broad range of government activities. Training, good documentation and access to new information systems have driven a remarkable change in breadth of activity and motivation. One of these new knowledge workers tells of early operations where staff of the then Motor Vehicle Registry told their colleagues in the face of a lunch time rush, ‘Slow down, don’t hurry – there will always be a queue.’ Now despite unexpectedly large customer volumes, queues (even the long lunch time ones) are fast moving and customer satisfaction is high.

In a significant development for rural people, Westpac and the Tasmanian Government have formed a partnership to take banking services back to people living in regional and remote areas through Service Tasmania. A pilot will commence in September with a new Service Tasmania shop opening in Triabunna on the East Coast of Tasmania, delivering one-stop-shop services and Westpac banking. The Triabunna Westpac branch closed over 12 months ago leaving the community and surrounds 200 kilometres from the nearest bank.

Telecommunications is also allowing us to introduce service packages that bring together multi-agency transactions so that they appear as a single transaction from the customer’s point of view. Change of address notification is a good example that is already operating.

A word of warning is necessary here. For those of you anxious to retain the existing paradigm of public sector fiefdoms Service Tasmania is not the way to go. The cultural shift and agency cooperation necessary to achieve a service delivery mechanism like Service Tasmania has provided a challenge to narrow agency focused administrators. Initiatives like this will ultimately challenge agency boundaries - in the interests of better service.

Tasmania is also fully integrating its land information between the various data custodians including between levels of government. By land information I mean more than 300 types of information relating to land, the full range of geographic information including physical characteristics, environmental information, services and spatial relationships, and covering diverse groupings like transport, communications, geoscientific, demographic and cultural. We are half way through this project and investors, other business users and the public are already accessing information from one place, although it is held in many places. This is another example of government using information-based systems to fundamentally change its internal business processes in order to provide a benefit to the community.

The Tasmanian Government is taking its role of leadership with information-based systems seriously. To ensure that the electronic channel becomes the authoritative source of information, the Government has decided that from 1 July this year all publications produced by agencies and designed for public use will be first published on the web and then in other forms as required.

Another example is access to legislation. We have changed our legislation drafting process to support an electronic environment. This provides for automatic consolidation of amendments and automatic electronic publication of both the consolidated legislation and the sessional history. Anyone can look up legislation on the web. You see the legislation with all current amendments already incorporated – you don’t need to chase up four different documents.

So far I have concentrated on the transformation the information economy is enabling within government. I will now broaden the scope of the discussion to include business opportunities and community participation. As part of building new service industries, Tasmania is aggressively pursuing a call centre strategy and employment in this sector is growing quickly. Many places are trying to attract call centres. Regional communities can identify competitive advantages for information-based industries. These centres have come to Tasmania not only because the cost structures are competitive but because our call centres consistently demonstrate lower staff turnover rates, lower training costs and higher call conversion rates than equivalent facilities in the big cities. Our people value their jobs, expect to work hard, and have an approach to others which is based on their sense of community. They project this through their call centre work and customers respond positively.

Just over 2000 new jobs in call centres have been created by businesses in Tasmania in the last year and a half. This is an example of telecommunications allowing regional communities to leverage economic value off their unique social and community fabric. Real community participation and ownership requires people who:

-   understand the technologies in the same way that we understand the importance of farming or forestry

-   learn how to make them part of daily life in the same way as other technologically sophisticated everyday activities like using a credit card or driving a car

-   learn how to make use of the new opportunities which they create for community services and businesses, and

-   learn how to support community values in and through this new environment.

If the community is to embrace these new technologies then all the community must have access to the services. This is especially a problem with Internet based services. The availability of useful applications online will help increase ownership of the necessary technology but the successful use of telecommunications as a public policy tool needs to address the transition period and deal with those unable to pay.

Tasmania is implementing a community online access program to address this challenge. The program is providing a network of centres operated by community organisations and through government facilities like libraries, schools and Service Tasmania shops. The centres provide public Internet access, transaction services through Service Tasmania, web publishing resources and links to training providers. Grateful communities are embracing the opportunities. The coordinator of the online access program mentioned that not only does she get lots of hugs from grateful community members but people in remote communities are saying things like, ‘You’ve saved our community.’ The program objective is to have 60 centres open across Tasmania by the middle of next year. Twenty are already open.

You will notice that so far I have talked about what the Government is doing to provide leadership in the process of transformation and to encourage access. But community participation and ownership is an essential element of success. If the effort is simply based on government then it will not be sustainable because the necessary transformation will not occur throughout the whole community.

There are many ways to engage with a community. What we have done is implement a methodology developed by Nortel called the Integrated Community Network, or in our setting, the Tasmanian Community Network. The approach has been used all over the world from North America to Soweto.

The Tasmanian Community Network approach is both a vision and a set of strategies and tools to achieve that vision. The vision is of a comprehensive, shared-use telecommunications network designed to serve the needs of people in an entire community, whether that community is defined as a town, city, region, state or even a community of interest. The network links a community’s people, businesses and institutions and allows them to share information, solve problems, exchange resources, create new forms of commerce and compete in a global economy.

This is not about infrastructure although the existence of an enabling physical network and telecommunications services is obviously essential. Rather the network is defined as the linkages between people and institutions and applications using telecommunications as the lever to break down silos and create new opportunities. It also stresses the importance of shared use as a means to overcome barriers like cost and availability.

In regional economies many of the solutions involve shared activity with government. But the TCN links government initiatives to a strong state-wide people network – building powerful community understanding and support of technology. A process has been agreed with the community that brings together groups of people at local, regional, statewide and community interest level to share ideas, identify key issues like jobs or education and develop solutions. The TCN allows communities to take control of their future rather than simply be overwhelmed by it.

A range of projects is underway which has been generated from local communities and is being coordinated by three regional taskforces. The key issues that the projects address are unemployment, particularly for young people, the future of rural and remote communities, competitiveness in world markets, access to training, education and information technology. These are common themes around the world.

I’ll just mention two of the projects. They are very modest but they address the very concerns that are bedevilling our rural communities. The first is a pilot program to teach older people basic computer skills. A Hobart high school is working with residents of a nursing home to introduce them to the information age. Early indications are positive with residents, including one 89-year-old enjoying the experience. It is hoped the program will encourage similar homes and senior citizens groups to introduce computer facilities. The second project is simply the production of a guide to video conferencing, describing what it is, how to use it, its value and available venues. Surprisingly we’ve had interest from other states. It seems a similar guide isn’t available elsewhere!

We are only at the very beginning of this path with the community and, to be frank, it is hard work. But we think it has been the right decision. We thought that we were moving fast but we are struggling to keep up with the pace at which our communities want to move forward.

While the focus is on communities there is a lot of bureaucratic investment in achieving positive outcomes. We must be doing something right because despite a change of Government in the last few weeks it is still full steam ahead.

But this is good. There is no time to delay. Some of the recent political developments in Australia highlight the uncertainty being experienced in struggling regional and rural communities. In Tasmania we are assisting communities to grapple the challenges head on by making intelligent use of the information economy as a tool for transformation.

-  end -