The funding and staffing restrictions Cormann’s Department has imposed on Home Affairs has not only led to a reduction in immigration integrity and massive long-term costs but it may have also driven Home Affairs into the foolishness of visa privatisation.

For most of the twentieth century, Census Bureau administrators resisted private-sector intrusion into data capture and processing operations, but beginning in the mid-1990s, the Census Bureau increasingly turned to outside vendors from the private sector for data captureand processing. Thisprivatization led to rapidly escalating costs, reduced productivity, near catastrophic failures of the 2000 and 2010 censuses, and high risks for the 2020 census.

policy teams used to have some opportunity for self-directed exploration of policy options for the government of the day and, although some teams still have this role, I have seen increasingly fewer policy professionals and teams have this opportunity. This creates an opportunity cost, as policy professionals are sometimes in a good position to see and explore emerging trends across a system or government as they arise, especially when policy teams stay connected to several areas of implementation as they pertain to a policy objective. An overwhelming financial imperative, unbalanced by other pressures, makes it hard in public sectors to justify creating space and time for innovating or addressing long term challenges, even though, ironically, many in the private sector manage to fund innovation just fine.

I believe that many of the current challenges in public sectors link back to two causal factors: googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1560300455224-0'); }); The impact of increasing reactivism to politics and 24-hour media scrutiny, in public sectors (which varies across jurisdictions); and The unintended consequences of New Public Management and trying to make public sectors act like the private sector.

However, PIPA is the agency's first standalone bot, meaning it can be used across multiple government agencies. Crucially, the bot can be embedded within web and mobile apps, as well as within third-party personal assistants, such as Google Home and Alexa.  According to Keenan, the gang of five digital assistants released so far by the DHS have answered "more than 2.3 million questions, reducing the need for people to have to pick up a phone or come into a service centre for help.” “This is what our digital transformation program is all about – making life simpler and easier for all Australians.”

uman Services has a number of public-facing chatbots already. The newest of them is ‘Charles’, launched last year, which offers support for the government’s MyGov service.Others include ‘Sam’ and ‘Oliver’, both of which launched in 2017. The department’s customer-facing digital assistants have so far answered more than 2.3 million questions. Human Services also uses a number of staff-facing chatbots. In November Keenan revealed that the department had launched an Augmented Intelligence Centre of Excellence, which the minister said would boost collaboration with industry, academia and other government entities.

The federal government has decided that all Commonwealth entities would benefit from having a chatbot, with the Department of Human Services (DHS) announcing it was working on the development of one that will be ready by the end of 2019.The Platform Independent Personal Assistant -- PIPA -- is expected to "significantly improve the customer experience for users of online government services", according to Minister for Human Services and Digital Transformation Michael Keenan.

Before implementing Alex 2.5 years ago, IP Australia staffers were taking 12,000 calls per month."Now I'm not saying Alex was the only intervention we had, but it was one of the main ones. Acting on the insights we were getting from Alex, we're now down to 5,000 calls per month and still dropping," Stokes said. "The value for money and return on investment is quite good."

No matter how well you design a system, humans will end up surprising you with how they use it. “We make it obvious that it’s a bot, a digital assistant, at the start. But sometimes customers overlook that. And they’ll say, ‘are you a bot? What’s going on here? Transfer me through!’ And they’ll get into it quite strongly,” explains David Grilli, AGL’s chatbot product owner

“Productive engagement requires policy development and delivery staff to understand each other and to trust each other. Sometimes, policy departments are trying to keep things very quiet, because we don’t want things to leak, but that often risks not [having] a fulsome piece of advice to give to government, so a balance needs to be struck.”

Deloitte has undoubtedly been the fastest grower in the last three years, seeing a 32% jump in revenue to $2 billion. In terms of growth, market leader PwC followed in second spot at 22% growth, with revenues up to $2.4 billion. EY and KPMG both grew their turnover by 20%.

new data provided by the Department of Human Services showed that almost half of all pension applications received last year were not processed within the timeframe set out in their Key Performance Measure standards

Fourth, even when government negotiates and writes a good contract it often does not secure the outcomes it should as a result of weak contract management. Contract managers must have the capabilities and information they need to ensure good performance.3

First, government did not always engage with the market early in running procurements or establish a sufficient understanding on both sides about the service that were being outsourced. This often led to problems over the lifetime of a contract, such as disputes and cost overruns.Second, an excessive focus on the lowest price and an insufficient assessment of quality in selecting bids undermined many contracts. While outsourcing can reduce costs, government must balance this against the minimum level of quality it needs in a service. Too often, it has outsourced services in pursuit of unrealistic savings and without a realistic expectation that companies would deliver efficiencies.Third, large contracts have failed when government has transferred risks that suppliers have no control over and cannot manage, rather than those which suppliers can price and manage better than government. Government should also not think that it has outsourced risks that will revert to it if a supplier fails – as the provision of public services will always do.

It must also understand why different outsourcing projects succeed or fail. The Institute for Government has previously showed that there are several conditions that make outsourcing more likely to succeed.2 Above all, these include: •the existence of a competitive market of high-quality suppliers•the ease of measuring the value added by the provider •the service not being so integral to the nature of government as to make outsourcing inappropriate.*