Digital expert: Metadata and ID keys to unlocking e-government

Joe Kornik:

Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview. I’m Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, our global content resource examining big themes that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide. Today, we’re exploring the future government and we’re joined by Dr. Ian Oppermann, cofounder of ServiceGen, a firm that helps global governments achieve digital transformation. He’s an industry professor at the University of Technology Sydney and is considered an expert on the digital economy. Prior to cofounding ServiceGen, Ian was chief data scientist for the New South Wales government. I’ll be turning over the interviewing today to my Protiviti colleague, Ghislaine Entwisle, managing director and leader in the Technology Consulting and Business Performance Improvement practice.

Ghislaine, I’ll turn it over to you to begin.

Ghislaine Entwisle:

Thanks, Joe. It’s wonderful to be here with you again, Ian, and talking about a great topic today.

Ian Oppermann:

Great. Great to be here. Thanks, Ghislaine.

Ghislaine Entwisle:

Ian, you spent many years helping radically transformed government services in New South Wales by building the state’s digital capabilities to deliver excellence. Now, you’ve shifted to a new endeavor called ServiceGen, which is aiming to help global governments do the same thing. Can you tell us a little bit about why ServiceGen and its potential impact?

Ian Oppermann:

Yes. Thanks, Ghislaine. Yes, it was a very long time in government, eight-and-a-half years in total. It feels just like a moment when I think about it now.

Now, ServiceGen, the tagline for ServiceGen is Government Services Profoundly Reimagined, and it really is trying to take all of that transformational activity that we did in New South Wales, bottle it, and point it towards other jurisdictions. Some of that transformation was about greater customer service. Some of it’s around greater personalisation. Some of it was just around making government easier to access. Of course, it’s all underpinned by data, digital, and, in some cases, identity. The ServiceGen offering really is the New South Wales model but adapted and redirected in other jurisdictions, and hopefully it helps other jurisdictions get through the really hard part of that transformation because very often they just don’t know where to start.

Ghislaine Entwisle:

That’s very exciting indeed and no doubt, there’s demand for that service globally. What do you see are the main issues that governments are struggling with as they go digital on that journey and equally, what are the biggest impediments to e-government and how can governments overcome that?

Ian Oppermann:

That’s a really, really big question and that is, in fact, why we got the whole ServiceGen activity kicked off. Very, very often, people expect their engagement to government to look like their engagement with their bank or with a social media platform with any now very truly natively digital service offering, and governments struggled to do that. Partly, it’s legacy. Partly, it’s the cautiousness of government, but partly, it’s the fact that it’s different. Government is different. It’s not optional to deal with government. You have to, in many, many different ways. That technical debt, that legacy, that conservatism all roll up into the need for pretty profound transformation attitudes and technology and in terms of capability.

Also, the way of thinking about doing government, very often governments get elected promising transformation and then they get into government and realise just how complex the whole system actually is, how many parts there are, how many dependencies there are, how much technical debt there is. Part of the challenge is just the reality of what’s already in place and the fact that if you’re going to transform, you still have to keep delivering essential services—in some cases, really genuinely essential services—wanting to do that transformation. There’s a lot of elements to pointing or redirecting the ship in terms of transitioning to e-government or transitioning to more personal.

There’s also the challenge that there’s a lot of interconnecting factors related to the different parts of government trying to work together. If you deal with your favorite online provider, you expect them to understand you when you’re a customer or when you’re raising a complaint or you’re paying a bill. There are so many different parts of government that when you engage with health or transport or education, it’s very, very difficult for those different parts to come together. Government genuinely is different but people expect that same sort of personalised experience when engaging with government.

Ghislaine Entwisle:

On that note then, artificial intelligence and how does that impact these issues that governments are struggling with?

Ian Oppermann:

Yes. Thanks, Ghislaine. It’s still a very, very hot topic and it has been almost—in fact, it has been more than two years now since we were all taken aback by what the new generative AI could do—but now governments are actually starting to find really powerful use cases. Those powerful use cases broadly come down to personalised delegations, so making sense of all the complexity that’s out there and intelligent summarisation. I think it’s still now quite a long way to go in terms of process automation, joining together processes that don’t quite fit together, and there’s normally a human being in the middle there somewhere as a necessary step. We are starting to see more of those use cases actually come to light and be deployed, and there’s still, of course, also the really cutting-edge use cases in New South Wales of course, there’s a whole lot of work that’s being done around use of AI for image recognition, for things like are people wearing seatbelts? There’s the work that’s being done around health, around wound management. There are still those really cutting-edge cases but the main office and back office work is increasingly becoming more mainstream as people try, test and learn and start to join together some of those disjoint processes or start to do some of the work around making sense of large amounts of disparate information.

Ghislaine Entwisle:

Yes. That’s really interesting. Do you also find that as governments become more sophisticated in their use of technology that—what impact does this have on the digital divide between citizens, countries, even continents? Do you think that e-government can close the equity gap?

Ian Oppermann:

That’s a really, really good question. My initial response would be yes, absolutely, it will help close the gap because it means more people could get more personalised services targeted at them. The reality, of course, is there’s always a proportion of society who either will not or cannot be on the other side of that digital divide, so there are people who don’t work online, can’t do online, don’t have connectivity. They just don’t feel comfortable engaging in a digital world. It’s interesting. I think it makes the divide more obvious. It makes the divide more clearly defined, and I think there’s a proportion of the community we always need to bring along in non-digital ways.

Having said that, for the majority of people, I think currently it’s looking good. It’s looking like more services get delivered to more people in a more joined up personalised way, but that’s all dependent on some pretty important things like identity and systems connected to other systems actually working together in a seamless way. I think the jury is still out.

Ghislaine Entwisle:

Yes, fair enough. It’s good to be optimistic but as you said, a number of challenges to overcome to get there. As we move towards a more digitalised government environment, you mentioned a little bit about identity. How concerned should we be about the government’s ability to protect data? The private sector, as we know, have had their fair share of struggles with cybersecurity issues. Are you confident that global governments might get that part right?

Ian Oppermann:

You’ve touched on what I think is the most important issue about all of the digital government, all the digital everything, and that’s what do we do with the data? How do we protect the data? We need to stop thinking about building data sets in the way we did in the 20th century. It’s not a relational data set that all comes together in one big blob. It’s really important that we stop thinking about that. It’s really important that we start to think instead about identity, which is a form of data, identity being managed by individuals in a Web3 sort of way as opposed to building a honeypot data set where you credential yourself at some level against that data set. If we build honeypot data sets, we will continue to have the sort of breaches that we saw last year and the year before, and then we’ll accelerate and it will become actually much, much more significant as we put more of our services into the digital world. We need to think about data fabrics, we need to think about virtualisation, and we need to think about people hanging on to their own credentials and allowing people, governments, to say does A equal B rather than tell me what A is or tell me what B is? Is A greater than B? Is A less than B, rather than actually revealing those underlying components? That sounds really simple but it actually means that we need to turn our thinking inside out, and it’s not just in one system. If all these systems connect together, so you have your seamless engagement with government, all the systems need to start that transformation.

I think there are good arguments for doing it differently. Increasingly, there are good tools, frameworks, and even standards for doing things differently, but we really have to shake ourselves out of this 20th-century thinking.

Ghislaine Entwisle:

Yes, absolutely. That honeypot approach should be in the past and the more governments move out of it, the better. Australia is in the process of rolling out the digital ID which as we understand it includes facial verification technology and also liveness detection. Can you explain a bit about how this will work and what really are the key advantages of that technology usage?

Ian Oppermann:

Yes. It’s a really important step, and facial verification is different from facial recognition. Facial verification is, are you the person that’s being put up as being you? Can we actually verify that it’s you? As opposed to who is this person who’s staring at the camera? That’s a really important distinction because it means that you’re using your biometrics to unlock information that you should have access to through verification. The liveness test is simply try to avoid that simple spoof where you can say, “Well, here’s a photo of someone or he’s me with a mask, and I look something like that person,” and unlock the liveness test prove that you’re real, prove that you’re animate, prove that you’re somewhere in context that you should be when you try to do this verification.

It’s a really important step forward because it does mean that you’ve got a really powerful and unique way of identifying yourself. It’s better than a signature. It’s better than, in most cases, a flat document, static document because you are real and you’re alive and you are the bearer of your identity. Potentially, it means that far more sensitive and personal services can be accessed in a simple intuitive way through this way of representing yourself in digital identity. The important thing about all of that, of course, is you’ve got this powerful key to unlock. It absolutely needs to be powerfully determined that that really is you when you registered in the system in the first place. If we get that right, then there’s a whole lot of really intuitive access to services that we will unlock, pardon the pun, through use of all that sort of biometric verification.

Ghislaine Entwisle:

Yes, fantastic. Thank you for talking us through it. If we fast forward into the future, maybe a decade out, let’s say 2035, where do you envisage we will be on this journey, the journey towards digital government services, and how do we get there? Do you have any bold predictions to share with the audience?

Ian Oppermann:

It’s really, this is exercise of what does the world look like in 10 years out, this exercise of talking about what the world looks like 10 years out is something we’ve been doing for quite some time, and it’s really interesting that you say 2035 or 2034 as a decade out. Time really seems to be ticking away. A lot has happened in the last five years or 10 years, a lot has happened. We’ve really started to realise the value of data or digital, but we still got some fundamentals that we need to sort out. We still need to treat data as well and as carefully as we treat electricity. We still need to wrap our heads around all of the effort and frameworks and tools we need to deploy in order to safely and appropriately unlock the genuine value of data.

Ten years out, I hope, fingers crossed, 10 years out, I hope we’ve actually sorted out the fact that data is not just something to play around in Excel spreadsheet on your laptop. Data is actually something you need to take really seriously if we’re to use it in a general way. Data has an infinite number of uses for everybody and in many, many different contexts. Every single bit of data needs to come with information about where it came from, how it got to you, its fitness for the purpose you want to be able to use it for, and after you use it, the data product needs to come with guidance restrictions or prohibitions. All of that is metadata. All of that metadata or all those frameworks are ultimately the safety standards, just like electricity, the safety standards we need to put in place in order to appropriately use data for those infinite possible future use cases.

My bold prediction is that in 10 years’ time, we’ll have realised, that we have put the tools in place. We’ll be sailing along with all these incredible uses of data and data-driven tools such as AI. We’ll be doing amazing things. We’ll have personalised health. We’ll have all these incredible applications we’ve dreamed about for so long, and we’ll be doing it safely because we finally have invested in that fundamental infrastructure associated with data.

Ghislaine Entwisle:

Yes. That’s fantastic. It’s great to hear the excitement in your voice and I definitely feel it as well, really capitalising on the value of data but also doing it in a very safe and secure way, offers such a world of possibility, so that’s great. Thank you, Ian, for joining me today. It has been a pleasure as always. We wish you the best of luck on ServiceGen and your new endeavor and no doubt, you’ll have a lot of success and we look forward to following your journey. Thanks again for your time today, Ian.

Ian Oppermann:

Thanks, Ghislaine.

Ghislaine Entwisle:

Over to you, Joe.

Joe Kornik:

Thanks, Ghislaine, and thank you for watching the VISION by Protiviti interview. On behalf of Ghislaine Entwisle and Dr. Ian Oppermann, I’m Joe Kornik and we’ll see you next time.