Staff Paper
Recent Developments in Commonwealth Information Management
Paper written and presented by Eric Wainwright, Deputy
Director-General, at Information 'Online & On Disc
97', 21-23 January 1997 Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre
Sydney.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Like other governments, the Commonwealth government is large and complex. It consists of 17 major portfolio departments and several hundred agencies, boards and committees, many of which are statutory bodies with their own legislation. While the majority of staff working for these organisations are members of the Australian Public Service, around 150,000 in total, an increasing proportion are not, as governments have steadily moved parts of the Public Service to become government business enterprises, with varying degrees of commercialisation and privatisation. With the new government, this trend is likely to continue, with an acceleration of contracted service delivery through privatised agencies and the private sector. The largest example is the new agency to be established later this year to deliver a range of employment, social service and community care services previously delivered by three separate government departments.
It is therefore a very considerable challenge for the Commonwealth government to develop a "whole-of-government" approach to the management of its information. It is very arguable whether the government can in any sense be regarded as a single organisation, or even a single enterprise. The Commonwealth government has been through almost two decades of reorganisation and reform which have involved steadily devolving management of financial responsibilities to individual agencies. Any concept of a whole-of-government approach sits somewhat uneasily with that trend.
Background
However, the present momentum for change in the information management area has derived mainly from two reports :
- The report of the Broadband Services Expert Group1 in December 1994. Because of its wide ranging recommendations the BSEG had an impact across government in drawing attention to the issues presented by the development of online networking. While no comprehensive government response was forthcoming, several of the report's recommendations were taken up in one form or another, and have influenced policy making since by successive Ministers for Communications and the Arts. As far as the government's own information management was concerned, BSEG urged that the government adopt a leadership role in promoting network services by its own agencies.
- The report of the Information Technology Review Group2 in March 1995. But it was the report of the Information Technology Review Group, "Clients First: the Challenge for Government Information Technology", which provided the main impetus for change within the government sector itself.
Together these reports created a climate which resulted in several actions during 1995 and 1996 :
- Initiatives relating to public access to government
- Community Information Network (CIN)
- Education Network Australia (EdNA)
- Australia's Story
- Accessing Australia
While these initiatives have been scaled down following the change of government, there remains some momentum on this issue, reflected in government pressures on telecommunications carriers, particularly Telstra, to provide reasonably priced digital services access throughout the country and in proposals on interconnection arrangements for carriers, generally in line with the Coalition's election policy statement, Australia Online3.
- Improved coordination of the government's own use of information
services and technology
- Establishment of the position of Chief Government Information Officer, as head of an Office of Government Information Technology
- Establishment of the Government Information Services Policy Board
- Establishment of the National Information Services Council and its bureaucratic counterpart, the Committee of Officials on Information Services
With the change of government, the policy-making mechanisms set up by the Labor government - the National Information Services Council, the Committee of Officials on Information Services and the Government Information Services Policy Board were all abolished by the end of 1996, although the position of Chief Government Information Officer and his Office of Government Information Technology remain.
The new Information Technology and Telecommunications Policy Advisory Committee (http://www.ogit.gov.au/ittpac.html) and the Information Policy Advisory Council (http://www.ipac.gov.au/) had met only once before the end of 1996, so it is as yet unclear how influential they will be.
IPAC's initial attention is being given to two references from the Minister for Communications and the Arts :
- Online infrastructure and services development in rural and regional Australia.
This clearly will affect government policy in terms of the equity in market reach issues for interaction between the government and the public and small business.
- The deployment of information and communication services and technologies within the services sector of the economy.
This reference is very broad, and will presumably take into account such diverse sectors as financial services, education, health etc.
It is also likely that early attention will be given by IPAC to security issues which are a constraint on the further development of online services, and to venture capital and other constraints on the establishment of new business in the online sector.
The ITTPAC has been concentrating its energies initially on the rationalisation of IT systems and outsourcing of government IT, and it may not turn its attention to the "softer" issues of information management until later in 1997. However, it is expected to deal with some of the outcomes of the Information Management Steering Committee's work in the next quarter. The Committee will also deal with the final version of what has become known as the "Blueprint", ie, the Framework and Strategies for IT in the Commonwealth of Australia. A draft of this document4, which is aimed to provide an overall strategy for the Commonwealth, was made public early in 1996, and following an extended period for response, the final version is expected to be available in January 1997.
The draft "Blueprint" included a section on information management :
Strategy 7 : Establish a framework for information management
Objective
The objective is to improve public and agency access to government electronic information services.
Issues
The existing framework for the management of government information was designed for paper-based information. Much modern information is digital and electronically based, drawn from a variety of media. Governments are data rich but knowledge poor : better electronic information is needed to support decision making. Throughout the information lifecycle, there are a number of different players with uncoordinated responsibility for individual tasks. There are gaps and overlaps. The Internet continues to grow in importance and places pressure on the ways in which government currently manages its information.
Proposed Activities
Develop a framework for information, defining all its component parts and the current roles and responsibilities of agencies. Identify and eliminate gaps and overlaps and develop strategies to meet the government's current and emerging information needs.
Develop a government Internet strategy and explore opportunities for information dissemination and program delivery over public networks.
Develop practical approaches to ensuring privacy, confidentiality and security in government's information management initiatives.
Formulate a set of common standards for electronic dissemination of government information in the context of individual agency control and responsibility for its electronic information holdings.
This draft blueprint reference led to the Chief Government Information Officer establishing the Information Management Steering Committee under my chairmanship with the following terms of reference :
For transmission to the Government Information Services Policy Board :
- Develop an overall framework for the cost-effective management of Commonwealth government information, as a national strategic resource.
- Identify existing initiatives in Commonwealth departments and agencies within the overall framework.
- Develop a preferred strategy for the overall management and retrieval of government information in physical and electronic form, including effective integrated directory/indexing services, publishing and distribution.
- Identify information management responsibilities for departments and for coordinating agencies, including the Australian Government Publishing Service (AGPS), the Office of Government Information and Advertising (OGIA), the National Library of Australia (NLA), the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Archives.
- Recommend principles for public access to government information, including such issues as pricing, privacy and security.
- Recommend mechanisms for cost-effective cross-agency management of government information and inter-agency communication.
- Develop strategies, priorities, a standards environment and an action plan to enable the government to realise the potential of its information resources.
The Committee assessed its objectives as follows :
Public Access
Enable all Australians, from a convenient, affordable and transparent access point in their locality to :
- Obtain access to all Commonwealth government information and personnel to which they are authorised.
- Transact business with the Commonwealth.
- Provide feedback on government policies and services.
Efficiency of Government
Enable all Commonwealth employees to :
- Obtain transparent access to all Commonwealth government information to which they are authorised.
- Conduct cost-effective and secure cross-agency transactions.
Enable all Commonwealth agencies to :
- Obtain the most cost-effective communications and information processing capabilities for their needs.
- Share information effectively across organisational boundaries.
- Transact effectively with :
- State governments
- Other organisations with which agencies do business.
The IMSC, which had representatives from 16 Commonwealth departments and agencies, issued its draft report5 for public comment in October 1996 (http://www.nla.gov.au/imsc/). Comments from departments and from other interested parties closed in early December, and I have been working directly with the Chief Government Information Officer and his OGIT staff to finalise an action plan to deal effectively with each of the recommendations.
However, before dealing with the outcomes from the IMSC's work, I must share some basic assertions which have guided me in chairing the Committee :
- The purpose of a government is to add value to the lives of the people it serves.
- Government policy/services will be better if those making decisions
are better informed about :
- Best practices
- Effects on those served
- Information is a public good : the more people have it, the greater the social benefit.
- Government should behave as if all information is open to the public unless restricted for specific reasons of privacy or security.
Fortunately perhaps, there was a reasonable consensus in the Committee on these issues, though understandably, the positions of say the Department of Defence, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs could reasonably be expected to differ somewhat, and did. There was general agreement that all the technologies for more efficient government and more accessible government are generally available or may be expected to be available soon, based on market trends - and that therefore the issues for the Australian Public Service are rather those of attitude and will, and how these may be reflected in policy and action at both the whole-of-government and individual agency level.
There is insufficient time for all the recommendations of the IMSC to be covered in this paper, and some areas are being addressed by other papers at this conference. However, amongst the more important were :
Establishment of the Commonwealth Information Framework
The intent of this is to enable the Office of Government Information Technology, as coordinator of the whole-of-government approach, and individual agencies, to have an aide-memoire to ensuring that all aspects of information management are included in their information management strategies. As a by-product, the Committee recommended that the OGIT develop a website which will enable all the activities relating to Commonwealth information management to become much more visible - one of the problems at present is that while there is much activity in working groups and within individual departments, this is not always known to others. Both gaps and duplication in effort can occur easily.
Principles
The Committee also believed strongly that the government needed to adopt a clear set of principles which would guide agencies in their development. It was influenced by the discussion paper6 of the Australian Law Reform Commission / Administrative Review Council, which said :
"As a general rule, government information should be accessible by the people because it belongs to the people. This requires a change from the traditional philosophy under which the government's information was regarded by the government (and often by the people) as the government's property and none of the people's business. The government holds this information on behalf of the people of Australia and should ensure that it is well maintained and managed."
The ALRC's final report7 went on to say :
"The Review considers that a general shift in focus is required - from one of not disclosing information unless absolutely required, to one of disclosing unless there is a very good reason not to."
The principles adopted by the Committee were of two types :
Information Service Principles
- Access to publicly releasable government information is a fundamental right of all citizens in a democratic society.
- Government information is a national resource, and subject to privacy and security legislation and directives, agencies shall ensure that the information they hold is visible and that information of potential value to individuals, the private sector and other agencies is accessible.
- Personal information shall be accessible only in accordance with statutory privacy principles.
- Agencies are custodians of their information. They are responsible
for :
- managing it, storing it securely and describing it so as to make it visible and, where appropriate, accessible
- making it available for evidential and historical purposes
- archiving it in accordance with government policy and legislation.
- Agencies shall take due care to ensure the quality, integrity and authenticity of government information.
- Agencies shall provide information in accordance with their charter
and Commonwealth legislation and directives, and shall make the following
information freely available, or at no more than the cost of dissemination:
- directories of services and organisation
- information needed by the public and organisations to understand their entitlements to government assistance and the requirements of government which affect them
- legislative information, including bills, acts, treaties, subordinate information, legislative status information, parliamentary timetables and Hansard records
- press releases, speeches and other public information released by Ministers, their officers and holders of statutory offices
- other documents and publications which are important to public understanding of government activities and the organisation of government, including annual reports, corporate strategic plans and other public accountability-type documents
- reports required to be submitted to Parliament
- a statement of the categories of documents maintained in the possession of the government and the means by which access may be obtained by the public
- information about their powers affecting the public, and manuals and other documents used in decision-making affecting the public.
- Agencies shall not gain a competitive advantage in their business activities through privileged access to publicly releasable information.
- In general, information provided as a by-product of budget-funded activities, or directly through those activities, shall be available at no more than the cost of transfer.
- In order to facilitate public access to government-held information and available services, the government shall work with a diversity of access providers, including libraries and the private sector, to ensure that government information is available in local communities.
Information Management Principles
- In developing systems for the organisation, transmission and transaction of information, agencies should start from the premise that, subject to privacy legislation, all information content will at some time be transferred across agency boundaries, and design access systems accordingly
- IT systems for common functions should be shared across agencies, where appropriate, to reduce development, operating and maintenance costs
- Commonwealth records in all formats should be captured in appropriate record-keeping systems
- Agencies should design systems which will as far as possible, facilitate information being entered into electronic form only once, then being reused in many different ways through standard inter-application interfaces
- User interfaces to government systems should be designed to present a consistent look and feel to users; common guidelines on the presentation of commonly used information and services should be adopted
- Commonwealth agencies should seek to cooperate with appropriate State and local government agencies in the management of information.
The Committee envisaged that the concept of an "Information Service Obligation" be adopted. This was defined as :
An information service obligation is an obligation on agencies to provide access to information or an information service that is budget-funded, produced on a non-commercial basis, which is required by Australians to contribute to democratic government and to understand and make decisions about government services and requirements.
These principles have not yet been agreed, but it is expected that the Information Service Principles will be considered both by the Information Policy Advisory Council and the Online Government Council, and the Information Management Principles by the Information Technology and Telecommunications Policy Advisory Committee.
Architecture
The Committee also proposed a conceptual architecture which could guide the future development of the "middleware" needed for effective access and communication.
The technical issues relating to this architecture are presented in some detail in Dagmar Parer's paper at this Conference, while some of the initiatives being pursued by the Australian Government Publishing Service are being covered by Jeremy Gregson. The key goal for the Committee was to suggest means of increasing the visibility of government information, ie, for people to be able to know that the information exists and where it is located. To quote the Commonwealth Ombudsman :
"Ideally, the FOI legislation should be a last resort mechanism to gain adequate information about a government decision or action."
The National Library has for some time operated the official Commonwealth government entry point over the World Wide Web, and it is now working with the Office of Government Information Technology to develop a project to enable an entry point set of services in line with the Committee's recommendation, which was that these should include:
- Home Page design and maintenance.
- Maintenance of links to all Commonwealth agencies and Commonwealth subject/ functional entry points; and to Whole-of-Government Entry Points for the State and Territory governments, and other governments world-wide.
- Maintenance of whole-of-government search engine capabilities.
- Integration of search engines, vocabularies and directories between whole-of-government and agency levels.
- 'What's New' service highlighting major government initiatives and activities.
- Online provision of any whole-of-government thesauri of terms endorsed by the GISPB.
- Coordination of whole-of-government function, subject and agency name entry points constructed under lead agency arrangements.
- Coordination of arrangements for ensuring linked government sites are authorised, and gov.au domain naming issues.
- Provision of facilities for the support of electronic forums on topics of relevance to government policy and services.
- Coordination of government-wide caching and mirroring arrangements.
- Piloting of a Government Electronic Mailbox facility for public feedback.
An obvious but key strategy was the endorsement of the Internet Protocols as the communication mechanism for Commonwealth networked services of all kinds.
One key issue is the development of fully functional secure electronic messaging and transaction capabilities for the Commonwealth. Such facilities are a necessary underpinning to substantial re-engineering of many government administrative procedures and service delivery mechanisms, such as those associated with benefits, claims, grants, taxation, etc. This raises a complexity of issues such as user authentication, directories, digital signatures, public key facilities, etc, and it is expected that a new task force to progress these issues urgently will be established by the Chief Government Information Officer, to build on the investigations already in train on a Commonwealth Intranet and wide area networking facilities. These issues have also been progressed in parallel with the IMSC's work through the work of a Commonwealth/State Electronic Services Delivery Reference Group which reported to the Government Technology and Telecommunications Conference in Melbourne in October 1996. The Reference Group had three working groups dealing with user authentication, local access point strategy and directory strategy, and it is expected that the work of the Group which has been further developed through the OGIT will be presented to the new Online Government Council at an early date. It is hoped that effective Commonwealth/State collaboration on the necessary infrastructure for secure messaging and transactions will enable a much faster roll-out of applications in both the government and the private sector.
Change Management
But at the end of the day, any whole-of-government strategies will only be successful if the individual agencies and departments of government seize the opportunities provided by the new network technologies to improve administration and services. This requires acceptance of the goals of open and efficient government, the motivation to re-engineer processes, and the provision of the skills to all the staff involved. The IMSC has recommended therefore a three-pronged approach :
- The development of a comprehensive change management strategy - to
be the responsibility of the Public Service and Merit Protection Commission,
the Office of Government Information Technology and the Management Advisory
Board to spread more efficient information management strategies across the
Commonwealth. There are many concurrent constraints to this happening.
These include :
- Knowledge, skills, training.
- Perceived lack of industrial strength products.
- Installed base of proprietary systems.
- Government fiefdoms/departmental autonomy.
- Conversion costs.
- Encryption / security standard / Digital Signature.
- Low agency expectations.
- Lack of synergy between those working on parts of problem.
- Lack of data on the current situation.
- Leadership unaware of IM issues.
On the other hand, there are very few incentives for agencies to collaborate at present, and the Committee has therefore made a number of suggestions :
- Central agencies lead in electronic distribution.
- Best practice promotions.
- Development funds for cross-agency innovative programs.
- Excellence awards.
- Key stakeholder support.
- The adoption of integrated information management plans by all agencies, based on guidelines to be developed by the OGIT.
- The designation of a Chief Information Officer in each agency, again based on guidelines to be developed by the OGIT.
Conclusion
Even if successful, these strategies will take some years to work through fully. The IMSC has been realistic in assessing the difficulties of moving the Commonwealth bureaucracy to take up ideal efficient and integrated information management practices which will provide real benefits for the public and business sectors, and in particular for taxpayers. But it has throughout retained faith that it is possible for this to happen, given appropriate leadership and planning. If the aims of public sector reforms sought in the "Issues Paper" of Peter Reith, as Minister assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service, "Towards a Best Practice Australian Public Service" issued in November 19968 are to be realised, it will at least in part be because the APS has not only the attitudes and structures, but also the tools of modern information management with which to deliver.
FOOTNOTES:
- Networking Australias Future: the Final Report of the Broadband Services Expert Group. Canberra, AGPS, December 1994. (http://www.dca.gov.au/pubs/network/toc.htm)
- Information Technology Review Group. Clients First: the Challenge for Government Information Technology. Canberra, Department of Finance, March 1995. (http://www.finance.gov.au/pubs/itrg/itrg-tc.html)
- Australia Online. Melbourne, Liberal Party of Australia, 1996. (http://www.liberal.org.au/POLICY/ONLINE/online.htm)
- Framework and Strategies for Information Technology in the Commonwealth of Australia. Canberra, Office of Government Information Technology, December 1995. (http://www.ogit.gov.au/publications/framework/framewrk.html)
- Information Management Steering Committee. Management of Government Information as a National Strategic Resource: Preliminary Report on Information Management in the Commonwealth Government. Canberra, Office of Government Information Technology, Final draft, October 1996. (http://www.nla.gov.au/imsc/).
- Freedom of Information. Australian Law Reform Commission Discussion Paper 59. ALRC, May 1995. (http://www.comlaw.utas.edu.au/law/foi/opengov1.html)
- Open Government: a Review of the Federal Freedom of Information Act 1982. Australian Law Reform Commission Report No. 77/Administrative Review Council Report No. 40. AGPS, 1995. (http://uniserve.edu.au/alrc/report77/ALRC77.html)
- Towards a Best Practice Australian Public Service: Discussion Paper. Public Service and Merit Protection Commission, November 1996. (http://www.psmpc.gov.au/aps/apsreformdiscussionpaper.htm).
