Digital Transformation in Government Insight #92:
Australian Government Digital Awards

The awards

On 3 October the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) hosted the 2019 Australian Government Digital Awards (formerly the ICT Awards) at the National Convention Centre in Canberra.

The awards recognised six categories:

• Outstanding digital product or service
• Outstanding digital platform
• Outstanding use of emerging technology
• Outstanding digital methodology or approach
• Excellence in government-industry partnership
• Excellence in multi-agency partnership

The finalists for each award were announced on 16 September. We’d like to give a special shout-out to two finalists for the outstanding digital platform award — the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC) for Single Digital Presence (we co-designed and build Single Digital Presence) and our friends at Today Design for MyVictoria (read our blog about My Victoria).

The winners

And the winners are…

Outstanding digital product or service

The Department of Health won this award for its new website myagedcare, which helps seniors and their carers find information and access aged care services. The new website targets 3.5 million users annually. The site includes a new design, information architecture (IA), user-friendly tools and new/updated content. The submission was titled: ‘Helping Australians make informed choices about their aged care’. Note: This is a GovCMS website, so also a great example of using a whole-of-government digital platform.

Outstanding digital platform

This award was taken out by Geoscience Australia for its Digital Earth Australia platform. The website/platform brings together a range of images and data taken by satellites of the Australian landscape from 1985 to 12 hours ago. The platform was built in partnership with the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), Data61 and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The submission was titled ‘Digital Earth Australia hybrid cloud platform for exploiting satellite imagery for Australia’.

Outstanding use of emerging technology

The Department of Industry, Innovation and Science won this award for a new PowerBI reporting system called VeRA that lets users access self-service reports. This is part of Australia’s venture capital tax concession programs, which currently total $13.8 billion of committed funds.The submission was titled ‘VeRA, the venture capital reporting and analytics system’.

Outstanding digital methodology or approach

This award went to Queensland’s Department of Transport and Main Roads for its TMR incubator, which focuses on co-designing solutions, fostering innovation and using new technologies to solve problems faster. The project was titled: ‘TMR digital incubator: building TMRs agility for a digital future’.

Excellence in government-industry partnership 

This partnership award went to Engine Group (industry) and seven(!) government departments:

• Department of Health
• Treasury
• Department of Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business
• Department of Social Services
• Department of Human Services
• Department of Education and Training
• The Australian Securities and Investments Commission

The award recognised Life Checks, a website that has two quizzes (one for those aged 45-64 and one for people 65 and over) and then uses that information to help the user prepare for the future. The website incorporated user research and testing to ensure a citizen-focused site. Like myagedcare, Life Checks is also built on the whole-of-government digital platform, GovCMS.

Excellence in multi-agency partnership 

This award acknowledged the partnership between Treasury, the Australian Taxation Office and the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment for the development of a Trans-Tasman e-invoicing system. The e-invoicing system is part of the Single Economic Market agenda.

Digital champion

The 2019 Australian Government Digital Awards also recognised a digital champion. This award went to Sandra Cook from ACT Health. Specifically, she was honoured for her work leading the digital reform that’s focused on significant consolidation of healthcare investment and the delivery of new clinical systems in ACT’s health services.

Salsa Digital’s take

The 2019 Australian Government Digital Awards are a great way to recognise digital transformation in government in Australia, and some of the innovative work and projects happening in the APS. We congratulate all the winners and finalists and thank them for their contributions towards digital transformation in government.