Stuff Digital Edition

Accelerator without a destination

Where are the hoped-for digital riches from the public’s investment in GovTech? Dileepa Fonseka reports.

‘‘Every year you’re getting eight to 10 different government agencies who are, within a period of 13 weeks, tackling what tend to be the stickiest, trickiest, problems on the books.’’ Holly Norton Sustainable Business Network

‘‘Many Wellingtonians don’t realise, but the solution to their housing problem is in their backyard,’’ Wellington City Council employee Erica Richards tells an audience at CreativeHQ.

She is wearing a T-shirt with the brand name ‘‘unlocked’’ emblazoned on it, two icons of houses forming the ‘u’ and the ‘n’. The pitch is being made Ted Talk-style against an austere Powerpoint and a largely blacked-out room.

The solution she is pitching really is in everybody’s backyard; she produces a satellite map of densely packed Wellington streets with circles around all the tiny lawns.

These backyards are where property owners could build the 30,000 homes the capital city needs, but the problem is these owners aren’t subdividing, or building an extra house at the back of their current one.

What people really need is an online portal which simplifies the whole consenting process and even allows these amateur developers to draw on templates to picture the kinds of houses they could build there, and find out what the resource consent rules are.

Government agencies pay $50,000 each to be part of the GovTech accelerator programme, and hand over their staff on full pay for three months’ worth of work at CreativeHQ.

‘‘Unlocked’’ was pitched in 2018 as part of the GovTech accelerator programme, and you can trace the idea’s progression from cached website entries.

It is not a long history. For much of 2019 the website remained an online form people could sign up for.

Then, it vanished.

Until Wednesday, when a team from the Ministry for the Environment turned up for a GovTech accelerator pitch. The opening lines of their presentation, delivered by Dan Harvey, went like this: ‘‘Someday I’d like to put another building on my property, I’m thinking maybe a cabin or a sleep-out.

‘‘I don’t know what the rules are for this sort of this thing . . . I would expect the information to be reasonably easy to find online . . . you might be surprised to find out that this is not the reality throughout most of New Zealand.’’

Wellington’s GovTech accelerator programme was initially proposed with the prospect of bringing great digital riches to the capital, but now people are asking what it is accelerating towards.

The programme launched in 2015 as one of the world’s first GovTech programmes. Initially it was part of a Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment R9 Accelerator programme, and advocates touted its ability to bring energetic tech entrepreneurs and government agencies together to create new digital businesses that could make money and solve pressing public problems.

Getting a piece of the $400 billion global GovTech market was still being touted in press releases as a key objective when the scheme was spun off into its current form in 2018.

However, like the startup businesses it aims to emulate, the scheme has had its own ‘‘pivot’’.

Where once it aimed to bring tech entrepreneurs from around the world together to solve big government problems, now it takes a government department and gets its own staff to come up with the solution. Something which need not be a digital business idea.

Tech investor and Sir Edmund Hillary Fellow Martin Krafft is one of those a little puzzled about the scheme’s current direction. He struggles to understand how it is different to a three-month brainstorming session.

‘‘If we’re not accelerating these people towards breaking even, and a good business model, then what are we accelerating them towards?’’

Rush Digital chief technology officer Danu Abeysuriya says the accelerator appears to have the ingredients of other similar schemes he has seen fail in large private companies.

The kind of financial incentives that keep startup founders working long hours, committed to their ideas for years, won’t be there once these employees return to their departments, Abeysuriya says.

Many of these employees were paid for 9-to-5 shifts, and their appetite for putting careers on hold, or working longer hours to pursue an idea on top of their existing job, would vanish with no prospect of additional financial reward.

‘‘The only benefit [for the employees] is to say ‘I was in charge of that thing’,’’ Abeysuriya says.

‘‘There’s no cherry on the other side. I go back to my day job, and my salary, and my meetings with my managers, and my bulls... 360 reviews.’’

In more hushed tones there are people in the capital who quietly question what Wellington gets out of it too.

Ratepayer-funded organisation WellingtonNZ funds part of the programme, to a level GovTech accelerator leaders won’t disclose. Westpac

Yet there are plenty of GovTech accelerator fans. Sustainable Business Network senior project and partnership manager Holly Norton is going through the process for a second time this year.

Norton has worked in government departments before, and went through the accelerator programme earlier, as part of a Wellington City Council team which ran a project around accessibility.

She says the condensed threemonth timeframe puts time pressure on people to come up with solutions, and cuts down a process that might take months or years within the government.

It is a three-stage process emulating the type of ‘‘sprints’’ seen at startups: A five-week stint where employees define the problem by conducting a lot of extensive interviews, followed by an intense and short project design phase of a day or two, and lots of testing to refine the concept.

Contrast that to a more typical government procurement process, where

designing a solution through a business case might take up to two years.

‘‘You build a solution really quickly, so none of the going around with big business cases, you just build something,’’ Norton says.

‘‘Every year you’re getting eight to 10 different government agencies who are, within a

period of 13 weeks, tackling what tend to be the stickiest, trickiest, problems on the books.’’

CreativeHQ head of GovTech Jonnie Haddon says teams that take part in the accelerator often combine personnel from across different government departments. If there is specific expertise they need, then this is brought in too.

Haddon says the problem with the accelerator’s initial focus was that government departments didn’t really want to let go of their most important functions, or outsource their biggest problems to a newlyformed startup.

‘‘So what we did is said, OK, let’s take government agencies and up-skill their staff in this process, this methodology, and get the agency to be the owner of creating the outcome because, ultimately, they’re the ones responsible.

‘‘And if they deliver that service through a startup, or putting out a tender, or building it in-house, all of those options are fine, and all of those are options that we’ve had come out of the programme.’’

Haddon believes public servants are publicly motivated to solve these big problems, and he is relying on this motivation to get people

following through once they leave the accelerator.

He also believes Wellington is attracting international attention for innovation within its public service, and if the accelerator grows this, then it will attract more companies to the capital who want to create these kinds of solutions.

‘‘Wellington is never going to be the financial hub of London, or a startup hub of Silicon Valley, nor do we want it to.

‘‘But we do have a really unique story and a unique proposition and offering to tell, which is: Innovation, and public service innovation, is a real strength of this country, and particularly this city.’’

As for the hefty fee of $50,000, this is a way of making sure departments have ‘‘skin in the game’’. The hope is bosses at these government departments will feel more pressure to use these ideas after having forked over so much money to create them.

Krafft says this means the process is effectively controlled by government departments. They decide who participates, what problems they want solved, and then exactly what happens to these ideas afterwards.

The opposite to the type of approach you might expect to see at a real startup, where the emphasis is on having no constraints.

When it comes to turning Wellington into a hub for government tech innovation, the big problem here is government procurement. Risk-averse procurement managers routinely lock out local digital

innovators who don’t have a brand name like Microsoft, or a proven track record, Krafft says.

He believes government departments can spur more innovation by simply making data within their organisation openly, and freely, available to everyone.

‘‘It’s a very, very bottled, boxed approach. Compare that to the Government saying ‘hey look here, are these open data interfaces and all of our code is online here’.

‘‘How many people would just use their

Friday to

Sundays free time to code up a new public transport information system, or a new wastewater early-warning type of platform?

‘‘The difference is, of course, that the Government has absolutely no control anymore.’’

Rob Deakin, manager of resilience at Toitu¯ Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand, is taking part in this year’s GovTech accelerator, and says he is hoping to create a solution to allow the public and government agencies to easily access timely information during a disaster.

It’s a problem people have been aware of for a long time, but he is hoping the accelerator will produce something tangible, making it easier to push departments into action on the issue.

He says the weeks of interviews involved in setting up the problem are really forcing him to look at these systems from the point of view of the citizen at the end of it.

‘‘I’m really grateful for the opportunity for the accelerator programme to put a real focus on this, and to deliver to senior managers the possibility for tangible solutions that they can get behind.’’

But whatever happened to that old idea, ‘‘Unlocked’’, which has recently surfaced in a slightly different form?

Wellington City Council housing development manager John McDonald says the project was superseded by the Rubric project (rules-based, resulting in improved consents).

Rubric’s interface looks very different to the slickly designed prototype on display in those Powerpoint slides back in 2018.

Norton says a crucial factor in the success of the GovTech accelerator lies in what happens afterwards.

Government agencies involved in GovTech need to trust the solutions that come out of the accelerator, and get behind them once their employees return to everyday life, she says.

‘‘These solutions are going to help a lot of people, so they’re worth listening to.

‘‘You just really need to back your people.’’

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2021-09-19T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-19T07:00:00.0000000Z

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