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Developing a whole-of-government architecture
Developing a whole-of-government
architecture
Graham Wilson – 11 June 2020
Tags:
Capability (/taxonomy/term/398) Platforms (/taxonomy/term/396)
Service design (/taxonomy/term/64)
We’re helping develop an architecture-based understanding of existing opportunities, to reuse
common capabilities and platforms across agencies. The aim is to further streamline
government services.
Caption: An easy-to-understand government architecture
This whole-of-government (WofG) architecture will provide a better user experience through
cross-agency design and investment decisions. The vision is to improve from ‘siloed
capabilities’ to ‘connected platforms and services’.
Stuart Robert, Minister for Government Services, announced this initiative in November 2019.
We established the WofG Architecture Taskforce to begin this work. It is made up of secondees
from the large government agencies, supported by DTA architects.
The focus is on providing tools and capabilities to support agencies and government to invest
in integrated capabilities.
Our approach
The Taskforce will deliver value to agencies in 4 ways:
1.
Championing users – show and promote a user-centric design of service and capability
planning, design, and development
2.
Connecting services – develop and promote guidelines, standards, and practices to
support connected services and platforms
3.
Building communities – create architecture communities to collaborate, innovate, and
design government services, platforms, and capabilities
4.
Enabling assurance – provide advocacy, insight, and tools to visualise and assure
investment and design decisions for all agencies
Why we’re doing this
The Taskforce aims to:
improve the user experience for all users – citizens, agencies and providers
enable current and future APS reform by enabling WofG capabilities
generate cost savings through informed investment and design decisions
enable a ‘joined up’ government through user-centric design, security and privacy
promote re-use and standardisation of capabilities, services and platforms
provide greater agility to support rapid change
Scope
The Taskforce will:
define the
vision and strategy
define a simple, understandable
government architecture framework
provide a method for classifying the important components
work with agencies to create ‘canvases’ that present ‘service-on-a-page’ views of a
segment of government. We will develop
tools and templates to help with this work.
set up an
operating model to help continued engagement, refinement, and usage of
WofG architecture products
A
community of practice of government architects will support this ongoing work. The
community will come together regularly, to share
architectural insights and work on specific
aspects of government architecture.
Who we will engage with
The core members of the Taskforce are from Services Australia, Australian Tax Office, Home
Affairs, and Defence. A full-time team from the Digital Strategy and Capability Division of the
DTA supports them.
There will be a working group with contributors from several other agencies, including service
delivery agencies, policy agencies, and central agencies. The Taskforce is also beginning to
engage with architects from state and territory agencies. This will make sure we don’t miss
opportunities to ‘join up’ services and share capabilities across federal, state and territory
governments.
Next steps
During the second half of 2020, the Taskforce will further develop its core products. These
include:
a catalogue of reusable platforms and services across government
a prototype qualitative investment tool to appraise the alignment of proposed initiatives
with the Digital Transformation Priorities
improvements to the Government Business Architecture
set up a Community of Practice
research into a suitable tool and method for collecting a knowledgebase of government
architecture
Further information
Contact the WofG Architecture Taskforce by emailing
xxxxxxxxxxxx@xxx.xxx.xx
(mailto:xxxxxxxxxxxx@xxx.xxx.xx). We will publish more blogs in the future about specific
aspects of the Taskforce’s work.
Graham Wilson is a Business Architect in the WofG Architecture Taskforce.
© Commonwealth of Australia. With the exception of the Commonwealth Coat of Arms and
where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under the CC BY 4.0 license.
