As the government chief technology officer and deputy government chief digital officer, Tim Occleshaw led the New Zealand public sector's digital government team from its inception in 2012 until stepping down in late 2019. During Tim's term, New Zealand became to be hailed as a standout digital nation and was a founding member of the Digital Nations Group.

Prior to his digital government role, Tim was deputy commissioner at Inland Revenue, responsible for information, design, and systems, and before that, CIO at the Ministry of Social Development. He was recognized as New Zealand CIO of the Year in 2008. Tim has also worked in the financial services sector in both Australia and New Zealand in various executive roles.

Outside of his digital leadership roles, Tim is also a professional musician and published author (under the pen name William Henshaw). Tim currently is semi-retired, and a part-time consultant in digital governance.

One of the first times Tim and I properly talked was in a place called Hell. Not to worry—it was only a cellar bar in the medieval old town in Tallinn, Estonia, when Tim was in town for one of the very first Digital Nations meetings. So, Tim and I started from Hell.

This became a series of conversations that continued across several continents, and quite a few craft beers. We picked each other's brains on whichever practical digital government steering questions either of us was pondering about. Tim has always been conscious of having an active life outside of work and outside of government. Therefore, a lot of our chats wandered to areas way beyond the digital government matters, too.

Tim came to the leading role in the New Zealand digital government scene at a time when the task was to elevate the game to the next level and across the whole government: from setting the strategy to daily routines of coordinating delivery or assisting the exploration of new directions (like in the Services Lab).

The work that Tim, Colin (his boss), and their team did to build up strong coordination and governance mechanisms to steer the rather autonomous players to step in the same rhythm is inspiring, in particular.

—SIIM

How Did You Enter the Digital Government Leadership Role in New Zealand?

A lot of my career path has been accidental—I have just seen opportunities and gone for them. I had been working for the New Zealand government for about eight years as the CIO for the social welfare department, and then deputy commissioner of taxation (responsible for information, technology business, and service development), when this opportunity arose.

Across the government, I could see a lot of fragmentation, a lot of waste, and opportunities to improve the experience of citizens that were not being taken. I had come from the private sector, where I was the CIO for one of the big Australian and New Zealand banks. There everything is competitive and about commercial advantage; you cannot share anything. I went to government with an expectation that it should be possible to share stuff and learn from each other. And there was not much of that happening! It seemed like an opportunity. When the job was created to actually do something about it, I went for it and was lucky enough to get it.

I joined to lead the newly created GCIO team as the Government CTO, also titled as Deputy Government CIO (later Chief Digital Officer or GCDO). This was New Zealand's digital government team, and I was excited by the prospect of delivering the government's digital strategy—our first challenge! This strategy, and its accompanying action plan, included information, technology, digital services, and agency leadership.

What Was Your Motivation to Apply?

There was a lot to do! Having worked within two of New Zealand's largest agencies, developing their technology and digital services, the next logical step was to endeavor to leverage that as much as possible across government, working with every delivery agency. Plus, I am a tinkerer by nature. I know that I need new challenges, or I might start to tinker with things that are already humming along nicely. I thrive on change, so I seek out challenges that I can apply myself to.

What Was the Institutional Context of Digital Government Steering in New Zealand at the Time?

New Zealand had set up a special “e-government” team, like the private sector had done at least ten years earlier. But it was getting to a time when people started to realize that a separate team was not really the best way to do things. Business is digital; you cannot separate them, nor have a digital team that is not connected to the rest of your services and technology organization.

That is why, back in 2012, New Zealand had decided to establish more formally the function of a government CIO. We would build a team around the GCIO that would drive digital in a dedicated manner across the public sector: to come up with a consistent and common set of standards and a digital agenda, leveraging ideas and assets for the whole of government. GCIO was designated as one of the roles of Colin MacDonald, the chief executive of the Department of Internal Affairs—one of his many jobs! So, my role supporting him was the most senior role purely dedicated to digital government. In my view, the creation of my role and the new digital government team in 2012, to develop and drive New Zealand's digital government strategy, was when the government really got serious about digital.

Less than a year later, the government started reconsidering whether the Department of Internal Affairs was the right place for the GCDO work, because many other countries had created discrete digital organizations. My view has always been that having the function as part of a large delivery agency is important. We recommended against creating a separate GCDO organization in New Zealand. Some people thought I was mad. But I had by then seen the real benefit in having the GCIO as part of a big operational organization with a strong delivery track record. Digital teams in other nations have been accused of not having to deliver anything, for not being on the field of play with frontline service delivery agencies. In our setup, we were always on the field of play. We were true peers of those service agencies.

Did You Hesitate at All about Whether to Apply For, or to Take the Job?

I knew that there was a huge amount to do. I knew that from looking into government from the outside, as a customer. Digital government across New Zealand was just about nonexistent. We needed to really ramp up the effort. We would have to get government agencies to cooperate in ways that they had not really done before, and it was not going to be easy. The only thing to do was to jump right in. It was exciting.

I think coming from both a private and a public sector background was helpful. Coming from the customer delivery side, rather than being a technologist, was helpful also.

Did You Have Any Conditions Going in or Asks for the Role?

I remember thinking at the time about what would be the key factors for success, and if I did need to negotiate anything special in that space. I had known Colin for a while and knew I would have from him the support I needed. So, in the end, the only thing that I asked for was the ability to build my own team in my own way. It was a pretty good match to Colin's thinking, because as I said previously, being GCIO was one of his many complex jobs and he needed someone to drive the digital work for him.

What Was the Expectation to You, or the Ambition Laid Out for You to Achieve?

The expectations were about the same: establish the team, build a strategy, get on with delivering. Building the strategy was the very first challenge. We had three or four months to build a digital strategy for the whole government and have everybody agree to it.

Ministers were thinking operationally: they wanted delivery of a concrete action plan with the strategy, and they wanted to be able to tick off the actions so that the public could see real progress within the first year. The action plan contained more than a hundred deliverables, and I am proud to say that we managed to deliver more than 80 percent of those within the first year.

For me personally, I think my greatest ambition at that time was to get government agencies to join up. We needed to get them to operate as a coherent ecosystem, rather than silo agencies having their own approaches; replicating or rebuilding what had been built by others; not sharing; squabbling with each other; being competitive. I believed we could do better than this in New Zealand, being small and agile as a country. Every agency I had to work with was a ten-minute walk down the road. Having the necessary conversations was not difficult, and I could look people in the eye when I needed to.

My belief was that New Zealand could be a leading digital government in the space of three or four years. I think we got there sooner than I had hoped, when we were spotted by Liam Maxwell of the UK, and invited to join the initial group of Digital Nations.¹

What Was Your Team's Mandate and the Mechanisms or Levers to Achieve These Aims?

The scope of the mandate officially was all agencies in the public service, plus five crown entities (such as the New Zealand Transport Agency, Tertiary Education Commission, and Accident Compensation Commission). Having that scope allowed us to work across all sectors.

Our job was to work with those organizations and influence them. We also had some limited powers of compulsion. For example, they were required to use a couple of shared capabilities, such as infrastructure-as-a-service or desktop-as-a-service offerings provided by vendors on contracts that we negotiated centrally. We did not provide these services, just brokered the deal and kept it all standardized. These mandatory offerings saved the government a significant amount of money.

Going beyond the official mandate, we were sometimes called to work with other government agencies unofficially. If any agency had a “digital” problem, there might be a ministerial conversation asking for our help. We would then roll up our sleeves and jump in to work alongside them, even if they were outside our mandate. We got involved with some local government organizations in this manner, too. We were always happy to help because that enabled us to build broader relationships and help a much larger cross-section of the New Zealand community.

Our mandate also included providing guidance and standards to agencies, which was helpful. Many of those standards did not actually exist at the time we were established, so we had to build them. We often achieved that by leveraging some very good work done by other Digital Nations. Digital.govt.nz leveraged work done by the UK and later enhanced by Israel. New Zealand's Digital Service Standard leveraged work done by the Canadian government's digital team based on UK standard. I am a great believer in leverage and reuse. Not everything needs to be built from scratch, and we had so much to do we did not do things that were not necessary.

In 2018, the then-new minister of finance, the Honorable Grant Robertson, took a real interest in what we were doing. He wanted to ensure that the government was getting the best bang for the buck with its digital and ICT investments. We proposed that the GCDO would need to be involved in reviewing all major investments with a large technology component, or any digital service component, and had to provide ministers advice on them. That strengthened the mandate for the GCDO team, as now we needed to endorse any big plans. Through that process change we were able to glean that there were more than a dozen discrete initiatives in the pipeline proposing to build an authentication or login system. Our strengthened mandate gave us a lever to compel agencies to use the government's official identity and authentication system—RealMe.

What Was Your Initial Plan or Essential Steps in the First Three Months of the Job?

I took over an organization that was going through a significant change and had had a temporary leader (reporting to a temporary chief executive) for some months. Job satisfaction and morale were pretty low; the digital team did not have any kind of plan. It had grown in an ad hoc way; thus, its structure was not optimal.

One of the first things I had to do was to build a new organization. That meant some new people but also restructuring—putting people in the right places. The team had been more about policy than anything else, so I focused on our new areas of accountability and structured the team on those. That needed to be done quite quickly, including giving people as clear as possible job descriptions and objectives. The lack of clarity had been a big factor in the poor satisfaction and engagement for them.

At the same time, we had been given a small budget to get the team's deliverables underway. That allocation of funds had been granted several months before I joined, yet there was no plan for its use. In my first six weeks, we built that plan and got it approved. That guided our first year's work.

Of course, the big activity in the first hundred days was the government digital strategy. I joined in December; the strategy had a target deliverable date of April to gain cabinet approval. Before the cabinet, we needed to get all the agencies to agree to the yet-to-be-developed strategy. It was tight. Part of the way through this period, the government added investment assurance and oversight to our mandate, which made it somewhat more complicated even. Ultimately, the strategy was signed off by all parties in June, so we got it done in a hundred fifty days.

During that period, I tried to do everything in a way that got buy-in across all the other agencies. Even when hiring senior people, I established interview panels that were all made up of me, plus two of my peers from other agencies. These were people I wanted to build relationships with, plus they had the right sort of skills and backgrounds, and graciously gave their time. When we built the first digital strategy, we set up a task force of about sixty senior people from across all the agencies to make sure we had the buy-in from all the big technology “investors.”

What Was the Time Frame for Your Strategy?

We chose a four-year time frame for the strategy. We knew that during that period new processes and technologies would come about, there would be restructures in government, all that sort of stuff. So, the strategy needed to be looking out a bit further over the horizon than just a shorter-term transactional perspective. Yet, we also did not want to go too far into the future so that it became nebulous.

Even with a four-year time frame for the strategy, we said that we would do a full review of the strategy halfway through it, and to change it whenever it needed to be adapted. We also planned for a full review of all of the actions every twelve months and to get ministers to sign off on those.

What Was the Gist of the New Strategy?

The underlying aim was to lift New Zealand from being rather fragmented in digital efforts to a nation that would be, at worst, in the “front half of the pack” globally.

A more concrete objective was to ensure that New Zealanders were able to engage with government digitally, on their terms, and not have to navigate many different ways of engaging with government. Another area was the information space: aiming to ensure appropriate security and privacy of people's information. This included creating the government chief privacy officer role.

We also had an objective focused on investment leverage. One of the pieces of our work was an inventory of all the big technology projects that had some sort of digital service implication. This was eye-opening. We got to see that there were way too many agencies trying to build their own authentication systems, as I said already before as an example.

The practical part of the strategy was the action plan—the list of things agencies were going to deliver. That is the part the ministers liked the most. This is pretty standard stuff, but, very importantly, it was where agencies were spending their ICT budgets. We made sure that we included big transformational projects already underway, plus some new ones. The action plan was our vehicle for the GCIO to have oversight of those projects and be able to provide input to agencies and to the ministers about their investment decisions.

In terms of transactional services, we set ourselves a target of having 80 percent of the most common citizen transactions with government online. To do that, we had to identify a list of top twenty or so transactions by volume, then negotiate with the agencies that owned and delivered those transactions or services to citizens, and then persuade them to be part of the plan. We also had to ensure that the target was defined appropriately. Simply being able to find information and download a form does not count! The target time frame was two years. When we started, there was less than 30 percent of these common transactions online. We got to the 80 percent target about two months after the deadline; at target date the stats showed us sitting at about 78 percent. So, we were a bit disappointed by that—but still New Zealanders got a significant benefit.

What Were the Mechanisms Foreseen in the Strategy for Ensuring Its Delivery?

The strategy had an activity stream on leadership across the system.

We knew that we had a cohort of chief executives and operational leaders in the public sector who were very capable, but many did not know much about digital or IT. They would not admit it, but a few might have been daunted by technology. Many pushed the ICT or digital decisions down their organization; they would not let digital stuff come to the top table.

We needed to change that because we needed to get top executives to buy in. So, we started the program of expert workshops for the executives. We brought people in from MIT and from industry. CTOs and CEOs of very large organizations. That was very successful; we managed to get chief executives involved in conversations and in our governance and collaboration framework, called the Digital Government Partnership.

We also kicked off the digital graduate intake program. This targeted bringing in qualified and digitally savvy new entrants into the public service, ensuring that they got a coordinated set of experiences and training across multiple agencies who had agreed to be part of the program. We cycled those new people through a structured rotation of three to four different organizations in their two-year tenure in the program. It built up a cohort that is now something like seventy or more people who are out there working in agencies, but also part of GCDO team as well in spirit.

What Else Did You Employ for Ensuring the Strategy's Delivery and Especially across the Government?

Collaboration is an absolutely critical thing. We knew that we did not have a big stick to hit people with. I have always been a believer that the big stick does not work anyway. You need to demonstrate leadership, to “walk the talk,” and you need to make people want to go along with you on your journey. I think you need to demonstrate that you are doing what you want others to do. Anybody with children knows that! They do not do what you tell them; they do what you do.

Without buy-in, without agencies believing in what we were seeking to achieve, we could not have succeeded. Influence was always the biggest lever that we had. Creating the governance and sharing framework that I mentioned previously—the Digital Government Partnership—was critical. This included almost sixty senior-executive-level people from across the government. If we had not done that, we would not have been able to convince ministers to set up a ministerial group to drive digital government. Ministers agreed to this in 2018, after chief executives supported us in advising their ministers to join.

You Had Planned for a Mid-Term Review of Strategy after the First Two Years—How Much Did You Change the Plan Then?

At the mid-term review, the strategy did not change significantly, although the action plan did. There were numerous new projects underway and, as a system, we had got better at working together.

Very soon after that mid-term review, we commenced work on the new digital strategy that would replace the first one at its conclusion in 2017. The new strategy was very different. We wanted to ensure that not only did it deliver for government and citizens but also that it had more relevance for the private sector. After all, the private sector is not just a key part of government's supply chain, but increasingly a part of government's service delivery.

The new strategy would still encompass government broadly from both the state sector and local government. At the time of the first strategy's end, New Zealand had a change of government when the Right Honorable Jacinda Ardern became prime minister. This government created the first formal ministerial role for digital government at the end of 2017. That signaled a shift in focus for us, narrowing or sharpening our focus to the public sector. The new strategy, my last major task in the role, was launched as the Strategy for a Digital Public Sector. I also decided then that it was time for somebody else to take the reins from me in the role.

With Changing Politics and Otherwise Things Happening in Life How Did You Manage to Keep the Delivery of Strategy in the Intended Line and Your Focus on the Strategy as Opposed to Current Events?

It is always hard. The agencies were constantly trying to get their projects over the line. Every agency in New Zealand would tell you the same story: that there was not enough money to deliver all the things that they had to deliver. They would tell you that building something that could be reusable by somebody else was not really palatable for them. “I do not have enough money to do it; I do not have enough time to do it.” Or their minister might say publicly that, of course, they were interested in the best thing for New Zealanders and to do the right thing by building stuff that will get plenty of reuse, but then privately say to the chief executive they wanted their quicker (and cheaper) delivery. Delivering things in a way that other agencies might benefit from them was merely a nice-to-have.

Quick delivery, particularly in the final year of a government's three-year term, is quite a challenge when you are trying to get agencies to think longer term. The reality is that you really only have eighteen months, or two years at best, to get big stuff done in any government. The rest of the time you are either helping to brief in new ministers, or the government is working in more of a caretaker mode with an eye toward the next election, and not making big or risky decisions that would not bring a delivery for them within the current term.

For me personally, I always think about the future, and I have got a fairly strategic brain. That is sometimes a problem because I am not great on routines, details, and processes! But I am always able to kind of lift myself out of the day-to-day and think forward. Perhaps thinking about what I need to put in place now in order to deliver the big thing in two or three years' time.

Some years ago, an old friend quoted a phrase that stuck in my mind. He said, “You have to be in the dance, but you have to also be on the balcony.” He meant that you have to roll up your sleeves and get on with delivering now, being hands-on with activities and focused with people. But you also have to continuously keep the vision, the big picture, the strategy firmly in your mind, and be looking in from the outside. Stopping to take a breath, particularly during even a high-stress situation, is a very valuable thing. Get up and go out for a fifteen-minute walk. Have a beer and conversation with someone who faces similar challenges. I find that those sorts of things can help the answer you are seeking to arrive in your mind sometimes.

I have always tried to have a space allocated in my diary that my assistant knew not to offer out without talking to me first, for going around and talking to people, or just thinking about stuff. I tried to ensure that every week I would spend at least half an hour just thinking about what it was that I would have to get done in the next five days. Then I tried to make sure that those tasks had either some of my time set aside for them, or that I had very clearly assigned them to somebody whom I could trust to get them done. I had to keep this routine and structure because it does not necessarily come naturally.

Your Title Changed Half-Way through Your Time in the Office—Why?

Yes, I became the deputy chief digital officer instead of CTO and deputy CIO.

It was a step change that signaled a bigger mandate and role given to us. It came with a small budget increase, which helped me to get some more people to do some more things on the digital front.

But I was also trying to ensure the role and our work made sense to outsiders. The private sector partners who had an understanding what was happening in other countries in the digital space, and the people from banks especially, were asking why is there no chief transformation officer or chief digital officer in the government in New Zealand? Within the government, we all understood what our office did, but it was not always clear to outsiders.

We used the change to clarify our mandate, to better explain outside government what it was we did, and also to build the consistency with other nations. We also understood how the New Zealand public service works. That the state services are a cohort of separate organizations with common purpose and common principles, but very little in the way of common work programs and common strategies. We were trying to swim against the tide of that and the title change helped by adding further clarity.

How Did You Build Your Team? What Key Roles or Competences Did You Look For?

The initial team was, in my view, too introspective. They focused internally on trying to develop useful standards and policies to give to government agencies, then crossing their fingers and hoping that these would be taken up. We had some incredibly smart analysts, and there were a few strong leaders within the group, but many were not as great at engaging people. We needed an ability to convert deep strategic thinking into a vision that people can actually understand and buy into. We needed to shift focus there, starting with the leadership.

We also had commercial people primarily focused on government sourcing contracts, like trying to secure a whole-of-government Microsoft deal. Some of the global corporations we dealt with are much larger financially than the New Zealand government technology spend, so we had very little leverage. In fact, we needed to work with the supply chain in a very different way. I brought in a former senior executive from one of those multinational tech corporations, who was able to engage the big suppliers building serious partnerships with them. This meant working out ways that these suppliers could leverage stuff they developed or tested in New Zealand into other parts of the world. They could showcase their good stuff with our help and our endorsement.

In addition, I needed to establish an agency relationship function because we did not have that initially at all. We hired people from across the system, some of them former CIOs of agencies, to manage the agency relationships and spend time with key decision-makers and leaders. Having that credibility as CIOs was extremely helpful.

Finally, I had to make sure I had enough people who were project delivery specialists and who would drive the delivery results. We had plenty of good thinkers, but we needed more operational delivery people. So, we brought some of them in as well.

What Was Your Selling Argument to Convince People to Join You?

I think my “sales pitch” to most was that we had a clear and strong vision. I certainly had a clear vision of where I wanted to go with New Zealand's digital government offering, and I could see a way to execute a reasonably good chunk of it, and to get New Zealand to stand out.

I was very enthusiastic about the vision I had, and that probably helped me sell it. I am not a natural salesman, mind you. It also helped that I had “been around”—in a big bank, CIO of New Zealand's largest government organization (social development), in the tax department. All of this gave me a reasonably solid network, and Wellington is a small city in a small country.

What Was the Culture Fit You Were Aiming For in This Team?

I wanted an organization that understood its job was about building a better digital world in the big sense.

Everything we did had to be about making things better. First, better for our citizens in New Zealand, better for government agencies, for New Zealand to set a better example for the rest of the world. But I also wanted an organization that saw itself as part of something huge—that it was a global movement. So, second, we were making government better for the citizens of the world.

Every time I stood up in front of people, whether it was an internal event, or at a conference, or a media interview, I tried hard to make sure that I was talking about the vision: where we were going, what I saw the future looking like. I unashamedly took every opportunity to promote that vision for the future. I learned this years ago in a technology role at one of the major banks—always talking in terms of customer's experience as opposed to the technology encouraged others to change their language and thinking.

Sometimes the legacy problem is not the technology; it is the thinking! Having a clear future vision helps people move away from the past, even if they invented that past.

As a Leader of the Team, What Were Your Principles or Mottos You Kept Infusing?

There was one thing that became a slogan. I do not remember whether I was the first person to say it or whether it was our media lead who worked closely with us. When talking about who we were and how we had to deliver our job, we had a simple mantra: “centrally led, collaboratively delivered.”

That was our way of reminding the whole system and ourselves that we were in the center and leading the digital agenda. But the delivery was actually being done across the whole system in every agency. It reminded agencies that there was central leadership, and they did have to do some things our way. But it also reminded everybody that the delivery was in their hands The agencies were the ones with the money, with the big systems, with the big projects. This mantra was even on the back of our business cards, and it stuck with us.

A big part of my approach to leadership is, of course, to bring in the best people I can find in terms of skills, experience, and intelligence. But just as important, I always seek to bring in people who have the right kind of cultural and personality fit, whom I could trust to get all this work done. After that, I think a big part of the leader's role is to give people clarity about what they have to deliver and then get out of their way.

It is really important to make sure your people really understand their accountabilities and goals, so there is no ambiguity. I believe people want to do a good job and be acknowledged for that. In my experience, if you have someone who is not doing a good job, it might be because they are not clear on what the job is. They may not see it the same way that you see it.

Second, I tried to make sure the people feel confident, empowered, and supported to get on with their job. Stay out of their way and do not look over their shoulder. Let them succeed.

What Were Your Routines to Handle Relationships with Peers or Stakeholders in the Government?

We had all the structured stuff I have mentioned—our Digital Government Partnership and its governance groups. Through those, we worked regularly with peers across all the agencies.

However, it was also important to maintain some much less formal relationships. We would go out for lunch or have a beer every few months with some senior people of other ministries; having an open, unstructured chat; maintaining the interpersonal relationships on casual level. This was in order to make sure that if one ever needed something from the other, we could just pick up the phone.

You Served under the Government CIO—Later GCDO—Colin MacDonald. How Did You Two Work Together?

Colin was the designated GCIO or GCDO, accountable for the overarching strategy and delivery at the end of the day. But he had a whole bunch of duties in his role in this wide department that Internal Affairs is—from local government and gambling policy to passport issuing. Much of his work, both policy and operational delivery, did not have much to do with digital government. Colin is a very capable leader, but, like many, he did not have much time to devote to detail. He could have only a few hours each week to be the GCIO. That is what my team and I were there for.

My role was to do the bulk of the work, but I could not have been successful without him. Colin was seen as a true peer by all the big agency chief executives because he was in charge of a large, pressured delivery organization. He could get the chief executive's attention if it became necessary. They listened to him.

We worked in a very integrated way with each other to ensure we got the best outcomes that we could. We were both together in the ministers' meetings because the minister expected to see the most senior person. But when Colin left the meeting, he often did not have the time to spend on debriefing it and explaining to me what needed to be done. He just needed me to get on and get it done.

Because Colin had distance from the day-to-day digital government work, he was often able to look at the work I was doing like the strategy and guide us for better outcome: some less detail here or more content there. His guidance was very much a part of our final strategies.

We had regular meetings of one-hour catch-up every fortnight, plus together in the governance groups. I always saw my role as ensuring that he was across the big issues, and particularly aware of any difficult agency relationship, in case a peer called him.

Looking back, I think our two roles were entirely complementary and neither could have succeeded without the other.

During Your Term, You Were Able to Raise More Funds for the Work—What Was the Trick to That?

It is not enough for an idea to just make good sense to get governments to invest. You have to prove the value.

The way we raised the budget for shared services—our common capabilities—was by setting ourselves the target of savings generated by the investment and proving we had met it. We commissioned one of the Big Four accounting firms to give us a framework and methodology through which to measure the savings. We also had them report on the results, which were then reviewed and confirmed by the Treasury. Being able to prove that your work had resulted in savings that exceeded your budget many times over was a hugely valuable exercise. We were also able to gain increased funding for investment review and assurance-related work because we had a proven track record in avoided costs across the system.

You Have Told Me at Some Point That It Is Important to Know When to Lead and When to Follow. How Did That Manifest in Your Work?

Sometimes the best strategy is not to break new ground but to be the first to follow. To take something that already exists. If it is good, just use it. If it is nearly what you need, tweak it. Even buy off-the-shelf. Then you can put your energy into something else.

That is why I always want to look for something that exists. A good case is the digital service standard. When we were starting the work on it, there were some people in the team who were quite determined that they would invent the New Zealand service standard from the ground up. They were saying that it had to be specific for our context. I ended up stopping it because I saw that there was a perfectly good service standard that originated in the UK and already had been tweaked by others, especially in Canada. If it worked for their First Nations,² it could possibly work for our Maori communities, for example. So, the team had to show me why it would not work for New Zealand, or we would go ahead and use it. We ended up adopting it with only minor localization. That is how the New Zealand's Digital Service Standard was born.

If You Sum Up Your Term in Office, What Are You Most Proud of as Your Achievements?

I would say that the delivery of the government's digital strategy was the single-most important thing. Well, two things as I ended up working on two strategies. They book-ended my seven years of leading the GCDO team. I started with developing the first digital strategy, getting it over the line and signed off by the whole system. Then six years later, I ended my time doing the same thing. We got the most recent digital government strategy signed off by the minister and published just before I finished up. Both strategies were important pieces of work. I suppose I am prouder of the first one because it was truly groundbreaking.

Another accomplishment would be the Digital Government Partnership governance model. There have been a number of people who have said to me over the years that it was a stroke of genius. I am here to tell you that it was just common sense, not genius at all! All I was trying to do was dismantle about a dozen completely fragmented and competing governance groups that were adding no value for anybody and create a new structure with a level of orchestration that gave us some control of the meeting agendas. The partnership model brought us agency buy-in to drive the delivery of the strategy, because we got a team of sixty senior executives across the public services involved.

Coupled to that is the achievement of getting the ministerial digital group together. This was by no means solely my success. Credit must go to Colin and the whole team, of course. This group was a great success though. Every two months the most senior ministers got together to discuss digital strategy and the work program for the whole public sector. Agencies had to report to them on what (and how) they were doing, while we listened. It meant that if they had not worked with us from the beginning to get our buy-in and support, the discussion might end badly for them, with ministers wanting to know why they had not engaged the GCDO.

Another thing is the common capabilities. I was very proud of having delivered those and saving a lot of money. I was once criticized by a peer from another country for negotiating a contract with a large multinational vendor described as “old school.” I explained that it meant we now had a complete view of agencies spend with that particular company, and therefore a lever to manage it down. Those common capabilities, and common software contracts, definitely have an important place in our story.

Do You Think You Had Any Failures?

Yes, I do. My biggest regret of seven years is that I was not able to successfully challenge the decision to close our digital services lab.

In my opinion, the lab was a great success and run by an outstanding team of professionals. When it was established, we did not know if it was going to work or not. In the lab, agencies could try out things they did not yet fully understand, could figure out how the new technology might benefit them—or not. They could work together in a safe environment that did not have a government or agency brand on it. It was a place where government agencies could all get together and just try new technology. Like building out legislation-as-code as an experiment.

It had some great successes. One example was the housing rates rebate system, which benefited about fifty local government authorities. We built it once instead of all of them having to go off to build their own because it was mandated in legislation. We must have saved tens of millions of dollars for those organizations. Or when we set up a really intricate virtual reality system, just to see how it might benefit some work. It turned out to be possible to simulate for policy analysts and decision-makers someone being indoctrinated into the world of hate, and what it was like to be the subject of such a person's attacks. This helped focus some of the policy response after the terrorist attack in Christchurch in 2019.

The lab was funded by small financial contributions from agencies. The expenses were largely just people’s salaries. It was not a huge amount of money burned if a project did not succeed in the lab. Far better than the consequences of a failure in the agencies' own environments.

But the decision was to shut the lab down, and I gave up in the end. We lost some really good people because the lab closed, some of them going back to private sector to do amazing things for other people. I still do not know what we could have done differently. I think part of the problem for ministers might simply be that failure is never palatable for them. Even though failure is part of any healthy development cycle, and even within an environment where it is safe and relatively low cost to fail.

Are There Any Other Regrets You Have?

I am not sure I always got the balance right between working outwardly with agencies and overseas and working closely with my team. In fact, probably I traveled too much in the last year or two. I did not see enough of my team; I became too disconnected. New Zealand is so far from everywhere that usually it was a long flight to get to wherever I was going, I would end up a week or two away from the office at a time. Possibly that played part in my failure to keep the lab open—I just was not there often enough.

You Already Touched Upon What Made You Move On—the Difference of Views Over the Scope of Strategy. Was That All?

I stayed in the job for seven years, which is longer than I have stayed in any other job in my career. Usually, I would do more like four years in a role. I stayed in the deputy GCDO role because I loved it. And I moved on because it was time to move on. Time for someone else to take over.

Besides the strategy viewpoint differences, I did have family reasons also because I needed to be with my elderly mother in Australia more. I felt, still feel, very proud to have played my part in building a very strong team, some significant and enduring foundations, and securing New Zealand's place as a leading digital nation.

Maybe I might have also started to undo the good things because, as I said, I am a tinkerer by nature. So that was part of my decision, too.

What Do You Think Were the Outlying Next Challenges for Digital Government in New Zealand?

I wanted to get into user-driven government, which had met some resistance during my last year of tenure there. To get from user-centered service design of ten years ago to user-driven experience. To get citizens much more involved in driving government strategy and policy.

I would have made the lab into a digital government lab, not just services. I could see the benefit of including policy work in there by bringing in people whose background is not so much technology but things like psychology, or sociology, or anthropology—to think very differently, very holistically about government. About how citizens and government need to engage in the now, in the medium- and longer-term future, which is not just about services. For people with a background in policy, this probably is horrifying. Some view policy as the sole domain of trained policy analysts, whereas I do not.

Here is an example I have often used: think about a scenario where you want to travel overseas. You might need to think about visas, or if you have paid your taxes or fines (if not, you might be stopped at the border). You are probably engaging with a travel company or website. What if, once you assert your identity safely, you could authorize the agent or bot to do all those things for you, Through APIs, the systems engage with government systems and figure it all out for you. Tell you if you need a visa, and you can there and then order it. Or renew your passport, pay your student debts, notify health or welfare services, whatever.

This frightens people, because that would mean government letting go of the control of the interface with the user. But the old way means you have to compel people to come to government on our terms. It means people have to navigate multiple access points and find a way to integrate them around their needs. Well, I do not agree with that. A government paid for by taxpayers should be supplying services on citizens' terms. That is another reason I wanted to take our strategy toward the private sector more.

How Did You Ensure What You Started Would Last?

Even though I did not get my “ideal” digital government strategy through, I did get a good one. This locks in the direction for the next few years, as much as one can in government.

Throughout my seven years of this journey, I was always aware that I was not the most important person in the agenda. The people who deliver day-to-day for the leaders of the teams, the people who do the work, deliver the outcomes. Those are the most important people. Always. So building an enduring structure, building job descriptions that have the right level of clarity of accountability and control and empowerment and so on and so forth, securing the budget for these things—that is how you make stuff endure.

That would always transcend my tenure in the role because I was inevitably going to leave at some point. I always had in my mind that I could be leaving next year, I could be leaving next month. One can never be sure. That is why I always tried to make sure that I had enduring structures in place, budgets in place, the right people in place.

Would You Take the Same Job Ever Again?

Now I know a lot more than I did back in 2012, when I just saw an opportunity and went for it. Now I would want to make sure that the job was going to be about those things that I talked about before: helping to ensure that citizens can engage government at all levels, including policy and strategy in a much more holistic way. It would mean letting go of tradition. So, if the job is going to be about that, yes, I would be interested.

What Do You See Are the Core Skills Necessary to Do This Job Well for Impact?

Resilience, perseverance. You have to be able take the occasional punch to the head. And there is so much to do. It is not a job for the fainthearted.

You have to be able to do a sort of “cat herding,” to juggle things that might occasionally be on fire—something very, very difficult. Humans all think differently. You cannot come up with a brilliant strategy and just tell people that from next Monday, that is going to be their strategy. You have to be able to consistently articulate and repeat your compelling vision and get people to want to come with you.

You need to be able to hold your vision and your strategy firmly in your mind while you are negotiating the details with the people who will deliver and facing the people who are opposing. Sometimes you need to have a spare hand to put out one of those fires.

Finally, there is the key skill that my friend quoted to me many years ago: that thing about being able to be in the dance at the same time as being on the balcony. That is a core skill for anyone who is leading in digital government, because there are so many moving pieces moving at different speeds in different directions.

What Are Your Recommendations to a Good Peer from Another Country—Tim's Friendly Advice for How to Perform Digital Government Leadership Well?

That is a tough question! I would say first to remember that the main game is about heading toward a better digital world. Do not let anything distract you from that vision.

Second, it is about people. There has been a lot of talk about sticks and carrots. I believe you cannot direct people and organizations to go against the objectives that are set by their bosses or their ministers. You have to work with people by being on their side, supporting them to change their organization's objectives if these are out of date or just not right.

The last thing, question everything. I do not necessarily mean challenge or resistance; I just mean look critically at everything. I have seen lots of occasions when somebody is doing something because it has always been done that way, even though the context has changed significantly. I would say that these days some things do not need to be done at all in a digital world. Sometimes the legacy thinking is just wrong, out of place. Always have a cold critical look at something that you feel is not quite right. It probably is not quite right; maybe it was put in place in the analog world and is not even needed anymore.