We haven't had an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. The last one was back in the 1800s,
so we really don't know how it would behave if we got it in. If we did get it in it would
have a huge impact on our trade. Our international markets would close down overnight.
So it's AADIS. Australian Animal Disease Model. What really stands out with AADIS is that
it also has a very easy and nice user interface. You can watch an outbreak or the disease spread
in real time and as it's playing out. It's a really powerful tool to bring out to not
just understand the outbreak as it progresses but as a training tool. As far as I am
aware no other animal simulation model can do that.
It's very agile because it's small and tight and can re-run a scenario 1000 times
and get much better statistical convergence in the distribution of the outcome.
It's been a very close collaboration between the Department of Agriculture and UNE, the
University of New England. The model was used in the United Nations Workshop
in Italy and all over Europe they got to use AADIS and that served as a nice informal
validation of the model as well.
My name is Graham White I am an
Assistant Commissioner at the Australian Taxation Office. I've had the pleasure of being the
project lead for the myTax project. myTax is streamlined tax return experience for individuals
with relatively straightforward tax affairs. Their tax information and income information
is pre-filled into their tax returns making it a very streamlined experience.
It's also an online experience, people complete their returns for the first
time on a tablet or on a smartphone. I think the things that help make it successful was
collaboration. There were over 50 people who were involved in the development. They were
from all parts of the ATO. We used as an exercise to bust down any solos that there
were. It's a huge red tape saving for the community. It's estimated that over $150 million
a year has been saved by the community and some people say it's only taking them 5 minutes
to lodge the tax return. We wanted to improve the client experience and we were able to do that.
The way that service delivery has traditionally
been done in government is on an agency by agency basis. Of course this makes it very
hard to integrate those services across agencies and especially across jurisdictions. Some
of the work I am doing at the moment in my current role is looking at how to actually
get a view of the user experience, anonymized of course, across different agencies across
different channels. Starting to get an idea of what that service delivery environment
looks like so that we can make a proper improvement. The second thing that I am doing is, trying
to realize the vision around governments and API. Making everything that the government
does, or the federal government anyway, discoverable in the first instant, but then increasingly
consumable. We are going through a bit of a transition, I think, throughout government
at the moment to shift from an old world approach to service delivery, which is very soloed
to a new world approach which is about mashable Government. You
can actually create this rich ecosystem where you write something once but it's able to
be delivered in many places. Practical example of a community approach
to matchability is actually Govhack. Govhack is Australia's biggest hackfest, it is a wonderful
community we have in Australia, very, very clever, very technical and we can do almost anything
We are talking about the energy rating label,
which is the sticker that is found on around 8 million appliances across Australia and
and New Zealand. The label has got over a 90% recognition in the community
and because of the longevity of the program I think it's got a very high level of trust
in the community as well. The label itself was always designed to be seen by the consumer
in the store, in the physical store. With so many consumers pushing into the online
space, that opportunity for the consumer to have the information on the physical label
is lessoning. What we did was create a handheld app for both. IOS, Android, Blackberry and also
Web which converted the kilowatt figure to a dollar figure really
quickly. We created a suit of icons and
a suite of graphics which the retailers can download and use for free either from
data.gov.au or through our own website energyrating.gov.au. Those icons could
be inserted into the existing retail websites. Our appliance energy efficiency
data it is generally within the top 10 or even the top 3 of most access datasets on data.gov.au
My name is Matt Fenech I am the director
of Continuous Improvement and Innovation at IP Australia. It's a great deal of
work that involves actually granting a patent. It has to be new, it has to be useful,
it has to be different. People are creating around 2.5 million terabytes of data every
single day. What we are looking at right now in terms of cognitive computing is trying
to sift through this large data that's been created to find out what is actually applicable
for that examination. IP Australia has an engagement with IBM and for the Cognitive
Computing Technology Watson. At this point in time we've started a prototyping exercise
with them and we expect that to be delivered by the end of June 2015.
Part of what cognitive computing offers in the examination process is a much more sophisticated
search tool to aggregate all of this data and hopefully allow us to provide high quality and defensible patent.
The InnovationXchange was set
up late last year and launched by the Minister in March this year to bring innovation to
the Aid program. What's making it harder is the fact that aid is really dwarfed by other
program flows. So we've really got to work at partnering with other organizations, particularly with
the private sector to work out how we can work better together to have a development
impact. It's really about accessing what is that company really good at.
and how do we use that for a development impact. There's a lot of Australian companies that
surprisingly are really, really keen to work with us now that we've put the offer out there.
We've also been set up to trial and to test, so this is a space that people can come and
share ideas, share their thought processes, brainstorm with us and then and then by trialing and
testing them we create an evidence bank that might influence other areas of the aid program
to try something similar or adapt the idea to suit their own country of context. This
is the creativity trialing and testing part and business hub of DFAT
My name is Connor O'Keefe and I am the manager of interactive learning solutions
team within the Shared Services Center. Learnhub is, essentially it's an online hosting platform,
we're able to host online training for Government agencies. Agencies can customize it to really
do a whole raft of different things. Online learning has been around for a long time but
it's traditionally had a very bad reputation because it hasn't been done very well, but
we have developed it to something which is really user-friendly, it's very clean, we
are taking out a lot of the functionality of the standard learning management systems
so that things that don't need to be there aren't in there.
We have an interactive security breaches video where people go through in a first person
experience, and as they are going through this video they have to try and click on the
breaches as they see them. We have also incorporated a bit of gamification in there
as well so you have a life bar. If you don't click on a correct breach then you lose a
point. This is something that's really exceeded our expectations. We now have 23 agencies
that have subscribed to it from across the public service which is over 20,000 public
servants I expect that number will probably double by over the next 12 months as well.
I am Clive Rosider I'm the program manager for the Single Business Service program.
Fundamentally, we are looking at changing the way that the department delivers services
to business. Typically a new policy or program is stood up and a whole delivery process will
be set up for delivering that. It's very solid, might be really efficient and really good
for that one program, but from a customer's perspective, it doesn't really align and overlap
with the way that we are already engaging with the department. The key areas where we
are looking at innovating is really in the way we are connecting up our channels so be that
our websites, our social media, the contact center, fundamental things like any time a
company tells something about themselves during the process. Once we've captured that information
we never ask them for it again, we just re-use it. That had been a real bugbear
for businesses. The other thing we are doing there is looking
at how we can ... If they've participated in a different program that had similar eligibility
criteria, how we can easily transfer them across and promote that opportunity to them
to say, "Hey you've already participated in a different program this one has similar criteria,
it's highly likely you're applicable, we've filled out most of the application form for
you. The likelihood of you getting through and being eligible is very high because we've
already done some pre-qualification."
If government doesn't innovate, if we don't learn to be responsive and adaptive to what's
happening in the world, then we make ourselves irrelevant. It's pretty simple, adapt or die.
Without innovation without trying to do things better or in a completely different way, we
are not going to move forward. You really need to tackle innovation from
the top down and then the bottom up. Innovation is not a seperate activity, it's
actually the way you go about your day-to-day job.
That's certainly the way we are looking at it, it's part of our approach, it's not a
'it would be nice if we could if we could be innovative'. It's essential.
You need to deliver what the community wants and needs. Sometimes there's a tendency for
public servants to guess what that is. There's always this risk that we become very
insular in the way that we are looking at what's around.
The community are demanding more contemporary ways of dealing with government.
Any interaction with government should be easy, should be doable through any platform,
it should available via any medium, Continue to listen to what the market is telling
you about new information and showing that innovation and then see if you can link that
to your own program objectives. How do you get more information out there that
actually encourages people to go: "Well if I can connect that piece and that piece,
I could actually create something pretty exciting." It's that real wealth of knowledge and cross sharing
that comes together to help help us all to improve what we're doing.
Your sound pit is the world. You should be looking at what everyone else out there is doing.
You should be building on the shoulders of giants. You should be getting out there
and working with and collaborating with other people.
Creating a physical space that encourages creativity actually brings about a bit more
excitement and a but more energy and actually encourages people surprisingly to talk with
each other more. If they've got a really good idea that they are
nurtured and allowed to develop. My tip and my advice would be prepared to
fail. It's a learning experience so let them walk
away from that and try something new again. I think it's an exciting and innovating time in Government at the moment
If I can borrow from Google thinking what's
10 times better that we could do or what's or what's 10 times the impact that I could
have that I'm having today and start from there and kind of work backwards.
You should be trying to innovate, you should be trying what you could do, you should be
figuring out how to automate different processes, you should be figuring out how to do things better.
How to innovate is simple, just do it.