TGF mantra infiltration... :-)

[Colin Wallis <Colin.Wallis@dia.govt.nz>]

 

Leadership Update: Tina Sutton, General Manager Government Information Services

As with the rest of KIRT, things are really hectic in GIS at the moment. Given the diversity of GIS, which I spoke about in my last update in KIRTlines, we have our fingers in a number of pies. The current favourite is the work we’re doing towards the Better Public Services result: ‘New Zealanders can complete their transactions with government easily in a digital environment’. In support of this we are redeveloping newzealand.govt.nz. 

The website was last rebuilt in 2008 and there has been very little in the way of iterative improvements since then. 

We’ve been looking at developing a ‘franchise model’, which puts in place a number of agile, cross-government virtual ‘franchises’ based around customer segments and topics (for example, seniors or transport). This model is proven overseas to enable government agencies to collaborate effectively in understanding and meeting user needs The model enables content to be delivered in a user-centric manner, rather than agency centric manner, which is a real paradigm shift for government.

The team is already working on user research to inform service design and information architecture. Some of this has been done online – you may have seen some advertising on newzealand.govt.nz inviting users to participate. We have also been running some focus groups and user testing in a lab environment. 

Learnings to date include a lack of awareness about the existence of newzealand.govt.nz, a good ability to navigate to the appropriate area of the government domain, but then an inability to navigate across the domain effectively and efficiently for related information. It was interesting to find that only one of the tertiary students involved in the research had a smart phone, due to data costs. If we can validate this, it has interesting implications for information delivery to this segment.

The rebuild of newzealand.govt.nz will be done working very closely with the Service Transformation team, including sharing research results. This is to ensure alignment with the larger Service Transformation work, and that newzealand.govt.nz provides an effective front door to interactions with government.

 

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