Victoria Wray, Manager Agency Standards and Integration, Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), New Zealand

​​​​​​1. How do you use your role to ensure that technology and policy are truly inclusive?

The Digital Services (Te Pūnaha Matihiko in the Māori language) branch of the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs is responsible for overseeing digital functions and services and building the digital maturity of our department and the All-of-Government system.

My Agency Standards and Integration team acts as a centre of expertise which develops and maintains web accessibility, identification, and digital service design standards.

I hustle for my team of accessibility, human centred design, identification and architecture experts who are at the core of making sure that New Zealand’s government’s digital information and services are accessible, usable, inclusive and trustworthy.

I ask myself – how can I better champion and support their work? Through telling their story, securing funding, and connecting the work.

There’s been a lot of amazing new work this past year. Making sure disabled people can used digital government products is a high priority. As a first step, we’ve published our first leaderboards ranking the accessibility maturity of government organisation’s websites.

It’s being done with an open-source automated web accessibility testing tool developed in-house and called the Centralised Web Accessibility Checker (CWAC — pronounced ‘quack’).

I strongly believe in the public value of open source – anyone can pick this tool up and use it.

2. What’s a moment in your career when you saw firsthand how technology or a new policy changed a citizen’s life for the better?

When government organisations put aside their boundaries and work together on a common user need – it is a game changer.

We’ve had great examples with SmartStart, the COVID tracer app and the NZ Traveller Declaration.

I’m excited about the current focus on collaboration across government and a consistent, joined up user experience of government digital services to scale this approach so it’s the default.

3. What was the most impactful project you worked on this year, and how did you measure its success in building trust and serving the needs of the public?

We’ve been partnering with a NZ tech company called Syncopate on using their publishing tool as a foundational data layer for standards and other regulatory information.

On top of the authoritative information layer, we have been using AI to rapidly re-draft existing API Guidelines into a technical API Standard (The New Zealand API Standard | Version: draft).

This approach has saved months of time and effort by experts who are time-poor. It has also created a dataset and tools that are reusable, meaning that we can now generate software, datasets and tailored guides to help people comply with the standard. 

To build public trust and promote generative AI best practice, we have referred to public sector generative AI guidance. We have also re-published that guidance as re-usable datasets and tools following a similar process (https://docref.digital.govt.nz/nz/generative-ai-guidance-gcdo/).

This will mean that people will be able to ask an AI for answers about these documents as the first step in their research and receive answers to the source documents with pinpoint citations.

While this sounds very back end, the real value is in being able to share service data via API to make the service experience for people more joined up and efficient.

4. What was one lesson you learned this year about designing for real people? This can be about a specific project or a broader lesson about your work.

A lesson I keep learning (or relearning!) is the importance of allowing enough time and budget for public engagement.

We are drafting the Digital Accessibility Standard following a discovery with disabled people’s organisations and disabled people with first-hand experience of interacting with government digital services. This is critical and in keeping with the principle of ‘nothing about us without us.’

Hearing the pain points people have is a powerful driver for the work we do.

5. We hear a lot about AI. What's a practical example of how AI can be used to make government services more inclusive and trustworthy?

The potential of AI to personalise the experience of digital government services is huge.

It can spin up plain language versions of complex government services, plus checklists – anything someone needs to make getting what they need easier.

Separating the data layer from the presentation offer up lots of opportunities to make digital content accessible on the fly – tailored around people’s needs.

We’re looking at baking in transparency – this has been part of the work we’ve been doing using AI to draft standards.

We will have a public audit trail for this work so it can be scrutinised by humans.

6. How are you preparing for the next wave of change in the public sector? What new skill, approach, or technology are you most excited to explore in the coming year?

Change is a present part of working in the public sector, but also reflects the world we’re living in.

From a technical perspective, I want to focus on learning about agentic AI – there is amazing work happening internationally.

To complement this, it’s important to invest in the ‘human’ skills around being collaborative, adaptive and resilient. Treasuring the things that only humans do is going to become more important.

7. What advice do you have for public sector innovators who want to build a career focused on serving all citizens?

Patience is really important. You need to be persistent in telling the story of the importance of user research, engaging with vulnerable communities – the ones we don’t hear from.

You need to work out how to take the tools of innovation – discoveries, human centred design, rapid prototyping – and embed them in BAU. We need to a culture of curiosity and experimentation.

It’s become a cliché – but it’s important to have room to test out ideas, where it’s safe to fail.

​​​​​​​8. Who inspires you to build a more inclusive and trustworthy public sector?

The people we serve. I’m in the public service to deliver better services more efficiently to everyone. The real-life consequences of poor service delivery are huge.

Even more so when these experiences lead to a lack of trust in government institutions.

Government needs to show that it’s worthy of trust.

​​​​​​​9. If you had an unlimited budget, what would your dream project be?

I would love to focus on using technology for deliberative public engagement for thorny issues like the use of AI in delivering government services – how do people feel about it, what makes it trustworthy?

Public participation is critical for trust in government, and I think there are so many ways we could do this.

Virtual ‘citizens assemblies’, AI agents loaded with your ideas and preferences, radical transparency – the list goes on.

​​​​​​​10. Outside tech, what excites you the most?

I consume a wild range of podcasts on history, politics, and culture – I love a mix of ideas. I also love k-drama and definitely watch too much!