Digital Transformation in Government Issue #109:
DTA’s whole-of-government architecture taskforce

DTA’s whole-of-government architecture taskforce

The whole-of-government architecture taskforce is part of the government’s commitment to moving away from a siloed approach and moving toward a whole-of-government strategy to deliver better services to citizens at reduced costs. The whole-of-government architecture was announced by Stuart Robert, Minister for Government Services, during his AIIA address in November 2019.

The taskforce brings together people from Services Australia, Australian Tax Office, Home Affairs and Defence, along with DTA members.

The taskforce’s role

The taskforce is focusing on:

• Supporting connected services and platforms

• Creating architecture communities to share knowledge and work collaboratively across government

• Developing guidelines, standards and tools to support whole-of-government architecture

More about DTA’s whole-of-government architecture

Beta architectural concepts model

Earlier this month, DTA blogged about the taskforce’s first deliverable — a beta architectural concepts model. (In this context, ‘concepts’ refer to categories of architectural components.) The beta model identifies 10 concepts/categories:

• External participant

• Product

• Channel

• Government service

• Value stream

• Enabling service

• Internal participant

• Business capability

• Platform

• Information

You can see a diagram of the concepts in the DTA blog.

The central concept is government service. This is defined as: “the end-to-end means of meeting a user need, such as applying for the age pension, or lodging a tax return.”

The 10 concepts also inform the taskforce’s streams of work. The example given in the DTA blog is platforms. Within this concept/category, the taskforce is creating a list of existing platforms and capturing the services the platforms provide and how they map to business capabilities.

The beta concepts model is the first deliverable (as far as we know) from the taskforce and shows some of the early thinking and cataloguing happening behind the scenes to deliver on the whole-of-government architecture strategy.

Salsa Digital’s take

We’re driven by our vision to help create a more open, more connected and more consolidated government. Whole-of-government services are key to delivering in all three of these areas. We’ll be watching the whole-of-government architecture taskforce with great interest and look forward to seeing the next deliverable.