Services Australia CEO Rebecca Skinner joined the agency in March, a week before the country started to feel the impacts of COVID-19. She said the pandemic fast-tracked the agency's focus on "agility" but touted the use of "human-centred design" had helped it make quick change.
"We've known for years that digital and agile was where we were headed, but now when there was this thing called a pandemic on our doorstep, meaning we needed to be advancing quickly towards the future," she said, speaking at the Digital Transformation Agency's Human-centred Services Digital Summit on Thursday. "There's no pandemic playbook you can pull off the shelf to manage this.
"Our pathway to the future is through human-centred design."
With thousands of citizens flocking to Centrelink shopfronts to determine if they qualified for support, Skinner detailed what the agency did to up its response to those making JobSeeker claims.
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"In the public sector it's easy to think about the scale of what we're facing as the problem. But every startup founder will tell you scale like this is the holy grail … because it's scale that gives you data and it's that data that gives you information and intelligence about your systems in action," she said.
Staff were taking tens of thousands of phone calls. Skinner said with speech analytics, that was an asset -- a "bank of intelligence".
"We could take the thousands of hours of audio and work out very quickly what people were finding difficult," she said.
Services Australia also had online interaction data.
"Here's a lot of people logging into myGov, navigating to Centrelink, starting a JobSeeker payment claim, and stopping somewhere