Data asset management key to NZ’s plan to ramp up AI in public services

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Governments need to manage data assets with the same diligence they apply to roads and bridges, says New Zealand’s Government Chief Digital Officer, Paul James.

Speaking to GovInsider, he shares that the NZ government needs to prioritise developing more mature and sophisticated asset management processes around data and digital infrastructure.

“Every 10 years, it’s been the case that we throw away [the data assets], we’ve built and buy a brand-new big thing. We can’t afford to keep doing that anymore.

“That’s not where technology is at now with evergreen platforms in the cloud where you’re just constantly updating [the platforms],” he adds.

Last month, the government announced an artificial intelligence (AI) framework for the public service, which provides guidance and a roadmap to safely deploy AI across government departments.

According to him, the underlying infrastructure needed for digital transformation and AI adoption is similar. He adds that digital maturity will determine the government’s AI readiness.

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AI opportunity for customer experience

Currently, there are about 120 AI experiments running across 40 departments, says James.

He adds that about half of them are targeted at improving efficiency and productivity, while a third of them are chatbots used for customer service.

“I think this will be the year where we'll start to see more experiments that are not about how people better manage their inboxes or website chatbots.

“We will start getting into core operations and responsibilities and look at the real potential [of AI] for different service offerings,” he shares.

He notes that an “unexpected way” of using AI is to understand one’s technology environment and modernise legacy systems.

Public sector organisations can tap on AI tools to identify outdated components, proactively address vulnerabilities and prioritise areas with the greatest needs.

The government has put in place several initiatives to encourage AI adoption, including creating communities of practice involving different departments to come together to share projects and lessons.

An example of a community of practice in Singapore is GovTech Singapore's STACK Community, which brings together members from across the public sector and industry to share and exchange information about GovTech's products.

Another initiative by the NZ government is leveraging cross-border collaborations for knowledge sharing. One of which include partnering with the national libraries in Australia, US, Canada and Singapore to deploy AI across knowledge repositories, he shares.

Last year, the NZ government chaired the working group for AI at the Digital Government Exchange (DGX), which is an annual global gathering of Government Chief Information Officers to explore progress in digital government and smart cities.

Joining services around single view of the customer

While NZ is a highly-digitised society, James notes that the challenge is in connecting all these services to benefit the customer experience – be it for the public service official or citizen using the digital services.

The government’s other priority is now connecting its identity services – from passport applications, citizenship credentials, marriage certificate, driver’s license and more – around the single view of the customer, he says.

It recently passed legislation to create a new regulatory system around digital identity and the new regulator will provide accreditations for digital identity service providers.

“We really look to the private sector to play quite a big role in terms of joining these credentials...

“Most people don't live solely in the public or the private sector. There is an interplay between the two sectors,” he adds.

The government is also looking to adopt a decentralised digital identity system due to its existing lack of unique identifiers among NZ citizens.

“So many countries have simply digitised their existing citizen ID. We don’t have that, so we can’t digitise an existing analogue system and have a digital ID.

“While that’s been a bit frustrating and challenging, we think that it's [overall] good because it has pushed us towards this decentralised, federated model, which will be more flexible, innovative, and ultimately more privacy enhancing and secure over time as well.”

But James acknowledges that such a system poses a risk of poor integration across offerings by both public and private sector organisations.

One of the integration challenges is interoperability among different frameworks.

NZ’s decentralised govtech

In NZ, there is no single central government technology office, but a designated Digital Executive Board made up of representatives from five different departments including James.

James is the Chief Executive and Secretary at the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) - the public service department which manages citizen registration data.

The Board leads the whole-of-system approach to transforming digital public services in the country.

James explains that the country's public service is characterised by high levels of autonomy.

A 2023 report by NZ’s Public Service Commission stated that "chief executives have the flexibility to manage their agencies in a way that can best deliver their agency’s outputs and respond to agency-specific issues and opportunities.”

“For the departments, we’re quite nimble and flexible. We can do things quickly, but it does also mean that we can become siloed vertically,” he explains.

This was a contrast to prior the 1980s before the public service reforms, where departments had to follow centralised rules and processes applied across the whole of government regardless of agency-specific requirements.

The Board was therefore formed as “the horizontal layer” – or “a single layer of bureaucracy” as James calls it – to strike the delicate balance between coordination, leadership and agility.

While the decentralised model “is a little bit unusual, but it really works for us,” he says.

When it comes to innovation, his department is increasingly moving away from monolithic projects to short and sharp delivery cycles – which he termed as “agile product development.”

Editor's note: We removed the citation of Open Government Products (OGP)'s Hack for Public Good hackathon as a community of practice as it is focused on OGP officers building tech for public good. 

To read our past coverage of NZ's Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), click here.