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(Gina Beschorner) it’s ground breaking research.
Partnering scientists with government I think
opens up new opportunities and new insights.
(Cecile Paris) It’s very exciting to see that
we’re actually having an impact on people because of the technology.
(Paul Cowan) It’s heralding a new way of working for the department.
(Narrator) Harnessing the power of science
to improve service delivery to millions of Australians.
That’s the aim of a $16 million five year research alliance
between the Department of Human Services and CSIRO.
(Paul Cowan) What’s exciting about it is a licence to
explore rather than just
our traditional role of delivering predetermined policies and programs.
(Michael Kearney) When you’re doing something complicated
like human services there are lots of opinions
about what will work and what won’t work,
what’s better and what’s worse.
What CSIRO brings as a science organisation into the alliance
is the collection of what we call robust evidence,
so rather than having an opinion we go out and we make some measurements,
we do an analysis and we say,
well from the information we’ve collected we think
this approach will be better than that approach.
(Paul Cowan) We are actively through this alliance looking at
gaining insights from the community,
from citizens in the community about how they want to
deal with us and what they would like to do when they do deal with us.
(Narrator) The alliance is already producing results.
Vizie is a tool to monitor what customers are saying
about the department in social media.
(Cecile Paris) It essentially adds some smarts
to the process trying to understand
what are people talking about,
grouping them into clusters,
organising them into the appropriate
discussions so everything gets grouped together
to then make it easier for somebody to look at
what is happening out there on social media.
(Amanda Dennett) We find issues that we were never aware of before.
We’re more efficient as a result because the tool that we built
together allows us to respond more quickly and archive those responses.
(Narrator) The pilot for Vizie
has proved so successful it’s been adopted by other agencies.
And for the department’s customers
it means they get the right information when they need it.
(Amanda Dennett) People have said
that they’re really surprised
that the government would respond to their question,
that they felt reassured
that they received official government information
in online forums where often it’s just peoples’ opinions
or experiences that are being shared.
And we’ve also received
votes for best answer on Yahoo! Answers
and there’s a bit of competition in our team to get best answer.
And what we try to do is just take complex information
and respond to people in a meaningful way
so that they don’t assess themselves
out of support that they could be entitled to.
(Narrator) The alliance is also helping customers
through a special online community,
Next Step,
for parents required to move from one Centrelink payment to another.
(Gina Beschorner)The community is a tailored space
that’s been made just for them,
so we did focus group testing before we created the community with parents
and we asked them what they’d need from us,
and a lot of the parents said that they don’t get enough information
from government when they need to do this transition.
(Cecile Paris) We’re looking at
how do online communities work?
How do people get involved in it?
How can we design mechanisms to encourage people to interact
and to share their experience, to support each other,
to be active in the community so that the community has more life.
(Gina Beschorner) I think a benefit to the department is
that we’re helping customers get better outcomes for themselves,
so by putting that bit of extra effort in early,
to give them the information they need
they can then make the right decisions for themselves.
I think that makes them then less reliant
on our department on the long term.
(Narrator) CSIRO is also measuring
how trusting these customers are.
Unique research with far reaching implications.
(Cecile Paris) The hypothesis is the more trust
we put in the community among each other
and to community provider,
the more benefit they will get out of it ‘cause they more they will share,
the more they will interact.
So we are searching the science looking at mechanism to
raise that social trust and ways to start measuring it,
and that is also I think quite important because
it might also increase the trust that
a citizen might have with respect to government,
government services and how the government is trying to support them.
(Narrator) There are about 25 CSIRO scientists
working on projects as diverse as identifying the pathways
people take through different social security services
and methods to detect patterns in social worker demand.
Other alliance projects are providing an evidence based understanding
of investment decisions and business processes.
(Paul Cowan) The alliance provides us with
a great opportunity to gain access to some really
first rate thinking that’s going on in CSIRO.
(Amanda Dennett) It has given the department
a five year period in which to really focus on research
to support our customers,
and to find efficiencies in the way that we do things.
(Gina Beschorner) We’re measuring things that
have never done been before in government.
(Michael Kearney) The alliance has the potential
to have very big effects on the way
human services are delivered in Australia.
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