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Government’s digital service offerings have significantly expanded in the past decade. Delivering simple, secure and connected digital government services is critical to achieving successful outcomes in an environment driven by user expectations and a rapidly evolving technologies landscape.

To deliver high quality and effective digital services to people and business, cross-government collaboration and planning is required. While improvements have been made in this domain, a history of siloed service delivery approaches and varied levels of digital uplift has led to a complex digital ecosystem and disparity in the quality of digital experiences.

Consistent, simple and inclusive digital experiences benefit all users but particularly vulnerable or marginalised people who are most likely to experience digital exclusion and most need to be able to access support. Research has found that those individuals who already experience social disadvantage, or other challenges, despite their access to the internet, are more likely to have a digital experience that does not fully exploit the possibilities that technology can offer. This reinforces their disadvantage, in what is referred to as the ‘inequality-loop’ (read more in The Self-Reinforcing Effect of Social Exclusion: The Inequality Loop).

Focusing on the digital experience also creates opportunity to reduce duplication of effort and resources and improve government’s ability to make investment decisions backed by data and insights, feeding back into the broader Investment Oversight Framework – see Policy Application and Compliance for more detail. 

Primarily the Policy applies to new investments being considered under the Digital and ICT Investment Oversight Framework (IOF), with the exception of the Digital Service Standard and the Digital Inclusion Standard, which apply more broadly. 

Where possible, actions to comply with these standards have been integrated with existing XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX