Pia Andrews

Why should we reform how we do policy? Because the gap between policy design and delivery is a huge barrier to good public service.

What will lift public service performance at all levels? Levers are useless without fulcrums, says Pia Andrews, and here are her five favourites.

The digitalisation of public service without the preservation of accountability and transparency has created several public trust issues.

I hope this collection of essays can provide some practical ideas, strategies, lessons and discussion starters for public servants across Australia and the world, and I look forward to continuing to learn, contribute to and support the public sector reforms and evolutions that are so urgently needed to support the communities we all serve.

Treating the public service like a business has become the norm, with the structures, language, practices and incentives inherited from private sector managerialism. We know that citizens don’t expect public sectors to act the same way — which is evident in the feedback, discussions, user research and myriad public engagements — yet when we adopt the mindset of a business we create pressure to act more like a business in everything we do.

Pia Andrews looks at some of the systemic challenges that come with working in public sectors, including intrinsic ones — like capability issues, and directive leadership styles — rather than extrinsic — like changing pressures from social, technological, and global economic change.

Openness is a critical tenet for modern public sectors if they are to be capable of responsiveness and resilience in the face of dramatic and rapid change, and to best ensure evidence-driven policy, programs, and service delivery. Pia Andrews has some ideas about how open government can (and arguably should) apply to all digital government and transformation efforts in public sectors.

As a public servant, you sometimes feel like you are being pulled in different directions. On the one hand this is normal, as we serve many purposes and changing leadership over time, but I wanted to encourage you to take heart, to find ways to maintain your balance, and to be confident in your work, because you’re doing a really important job. 

The opportunity of Government 2.0 is the ability to reimagine government and work towards fundamentally better public outcomes in accordance with the values and culture of the society you serve. This necessarily means we need to shift from a 100% reactive approach to megatrends, threats, and even opportunities and start to ensure at least a reasonable proportion of our efforts, time, and resources are committed to proactively designing better futures towards which we can progress.

Too many efforts to build trust start from the premise of ‘once people understand the benefits they’ll give us social licence to do whatever is needed’. It would be very helpful to ask people what it would take to trust us. These are all things to discuss authentically, early, regularly and openly with citizen engagement to drive policy development.

Pia Andrews explains the idea of “Government as a Platform”, commonly known as GaaP, including the benefits, challenges and how you could apply it in your everyday work, regardless of whether you work in policy, regulation, service delivery, or anything else.

How could government procurement be made easier? Pia Andrews shares some insights on how procurement reform in itself can be something of a red herring unless it occurs within a broader program of reform.

The next wave of dramatic service-channel change is happening right now, and again, people are largely seeing it as a future issue, not for now. What will be the impact and opportunities of personal AI helpers (Siri, Alexa, etc.) and changes to the infrastructure required right now if we want public services to be responsive to change and changing user needs?

For everything we do in public sectors, it is when we collaborate and draw on broader expertise and experiences that we get better outcomes. So, if is it such a biological imperative, why does participatory public governance seem so alien or novel to so many?

“Many hands make light work” is an old adage both familiar and comforting. One feels that if things get out of hand we can just throw more resources at the problem and it will suffice. However, we have made it harder on ourselves in three distinct ways, all of which are relevant to planning and programs in the public sector.