Collaboration as the Missing Operating System for Digital Government | Digital Leaders Series Queensland

1. Executive Summary

The Queensland Digital Leaders Series discussion explored one of the most persistent barriers to public sector transformation: collaboration. Participants agreed that the issue is not a lack of willingness. Across government, people generally understand the value of working across divisions, agencies and jurisdictions. The deeper problem is that government systems are not consistently designed to support collaboration at scale.

The discussion framed this challenge through the Future Government Institute’s progression from Government 0.0 — paper-based, manual processes — through to Government 4.0, an intelligent, AI-native model of government. Most agencies, participants suggested, remain somewhere between digitised service delivery and fragmented “Government 2.0” operating models, where services may be online but the underlying systems, data, funding and accountabilities remain disconnected.

Several themes emerged strongly: misaligned priorities, unclear decision rights, machinery-of-government instability, fear of losing control, fragmented funding, data-sharing barriers and the persistence of shadow IT. Yet the discussion also identified practical pathways forward. Disaster response, COVID-era coordination, digital licensing, AI pilots and 2032 Olympic planning all show that collaboration improves when there is a clear mission, executive permission, shared incentives and a practical operating model.

The central insight is clear: collaboration cannot rely on goodwill alone. It needs structure, permission, funding, governance and repeatable playbooks.

2. Key Themes and Insights

Collaboration is Not Failing Because People Do Not Care

A recurring view was that collaboration does not break down because public servants lack intent. As one participant observed, the desire to collaborate is generally present; the system simply does not make it easy. Funding models, governance arrangements, decision rights, procurement processes and agency-specific accountability structures all reinforce vertical behaviour.

This distinction matters. If collaboration is treated as a cultural problem, the solution becomes more workshops, more consultation and more stakeholder engagement. But if collaboration is recognised as a structural problem, then the solution shifts toward redesigning incentives, accountabilities and operating models.

Participants pointed to mission-critical environments as proof. During COVID, disaster response and other urgent events, agencies routinely overcame the barriers that usually slow progress. Data was shared. Decisions were made quickly. Resources moved to where they were needed. People acted because the mission was clear and the permission to collaborate was implicit.

The challenge is therefore not to invent collaboration from scratch. It is to make the collaboration that appears during crisis repeatable in business-as-usual conditions.

The Machinery of Government Reinforces Vertical Thinking

The discussion repeatedly returned to the structural realities of government. Administrative orders, agency mandates and ministerial accountability all define responsibility vertically. Directors-general and chief executives are accountable for their own agencies, budgets and statutory obligations. That creates clarity, but it also makes cross-agency outcomes difficult to own.

Machinery-of-government changes add another layer of complexity. Participants described agencies planning systems while simultaneously anticipating the possibility of being “mogged”. This creates uncertainty and makes long-term collaboration harder, particularly when agencies are already managing legacy systems, ageing workforces and competing transformation priorities.

The justice sector was raised as an example where multiple agencies may share responsibility for outcomes, yet operate under distinct mandates, budgets and risk appetites. Police, corrections, youth justice, courts and legal support services may all touch the same person’s journey through the system, but their data, systems and accountabilities do not naturally align around that journey.

This is where system thinking becomes critical. Government cannot deliver joined-up services if each agency is only funded, measured and governed against its own slice of the problem.

Mission Clarity Creates Permission to Collaborate

Participants consistently identified mission clarity as one of the strongest enablers of collaboration. When there is a clear shared outcome — such as disaster recovery, COVID response, the Commonwealth Games or preparations for Brisbane 2032 — agencies find ways to work together.

The 2032 Olympics were cited as an emerging “North Star” for Queensland. Even agencies not directly responsible for Olympic delivery are beginning to use 2032 as a planning horizon, creating a common reference point for investment, infrastructure, workforce and digital capability.

This matters because collaboration often requires people to trade off local priorities for a broader outcome. Without a shared mission, those trade-offs feel risky. With a shared mission, they become easier to justify.

The same logic applies inside agencies. Participants noted that digital, data and AI strategies gained traction when they had visible support from senior leadership and were positioned as whole-of-organisation priorities rather than technology branch initiatives.

Decision Rights are Often the Hidden Bottleneck

Several participants noted that collaboration frequently stalls when it becomes unclear who has the authority to move work forward. Cross-functional discussions can generate useful ideas, but without clear decision rights, those ideas become trapped between committees, governance forums and executive layers.

This issue is especially acute when initiatives do not “neatly fit somewhere”. Whole-of-organisation or cross-agency initiatives often cut across existing governance structures. They may involve shared platforms, common data, enterprise architecture, workforce uplift or service redesign. These are precisely the areas where collaboration is most valuable, but also where ownership is least obvious.

Participants also linked this to funding. Even when agencies want to collaborate, they may not have funded capacity to participate. One example involved an agency being unable to continue attending meetings for a new youth detention centre because it did not have the funding to support that involvement.

This illustrates a core problem: collaboration has a cost. If that cost is not recognised and funded, participation becomes discretionary — and discretionary work is usually the first to disappear.

3. Innovative Ideas and Case Studies

Digital Licensing as an Ecosystem Model

One practical example came from work on digital licensing. A participant described engaging with Transport and Main Roads and later Customer Services to integrate a builder’s licence into the digital wallet. This required work across the front-end experience, internal digital licensing platforms, legacy decommissioning and third-party implementation partners.

The result was a practical cross-agency ecosystem approach. Around 110,000 to 112,000 licence holders were in scope, with approximately 15,000 digital licences already adopted at the time the participant left the role.

The lesson is not simply that digital wallets are useful. The deeper insight is that licensing reform requires orchestration across customer experience, core systems, identity, data, legislation, vendors and agency ownership. It is a model for how government can move from agency-specific digitisation toward reusable service infrastructure.

AI Collaboration Through Cross-Agency Secondments

The Digital Transformation Agency’s AI technical standards work offered another example. Because the capability did not exist in the same form several years earlier, the team brought in secondees from major agencies across the Australian Public Service. This created immediate subject matter expertise, but also built durable relationships back into home agencies.

The approach supported collaboration in two ways. First, it gave the standards team practical insight into how different agencies develop, govern and use AI systems. Second, it created buy-in because agencies could see their feedback reflected in the products being developed.

This is a useful model for emerging technology governance. In areas such as AI, where standards must be practical and trusted, co-design cannot be symbolic. Agencies need to see how their operational realities are being incorporated.

Agile Decision-Making Through Co-Location

A New South Wales Department of Education example highlighted a simple but powerful intervention: physically bringing teams together. In the development of an education application, multiple divisions needed to share data and make decisions quickly. Traditional escalation through executive and ministerial channels was too slow.

The solution was to co-locate teams and push decision-making as close to delivery as possible without breaching governance requirements. This “agile governance” approach allowed the team to build momentum and demonstrate value, which then increased executive confidence.

The case reinforces a practical point: collaboration improves when teams share context, not just meetings. Co-location, even temporarily, can reduce friction, accelerate trust and make decision-making more immediate.

4. Challenges and Barriers

Structural Incentives Still Reward Agency-Level Control

Participants identified fear of losing control as a major barrier. Agencies and teams often protect systems, data, budgets and processes because these assets are tied to accountability. Shadow IT was raised as one visible symptom: teams build or retain their own tools because they perceive enterprise solutions as too slow, too risky or misaligned with local needs.

This is not irrational behaviour. In a system where accountability is vertical, control becomes a form of risk management. The challenge is that local control often creates enterprise fragmentation.

A pathway forward is to distinguish between legitimate local autonomy and harmful duplication. Agencies need enterprise patterns that support reuse without ignoring operational differences. Otherwise, “standardisation” will be experienced as loss of control rather than shared capability.

Data Sharing Remains Both a Technical and Trust Problem

Data sharing was discussed as a persistent obstacle, especially in sensitive sectors such as justice and health. Participants noted that collaboration is often constrained by fragmented systems, privacy concerns, unstructured data and uncertainty about what can legally or safely be shared.

However, several comments suggested that the technical problem may sometimes be overstated. With the right architecture, AI and secure sovereign environments may be able to work across unstructured data without requiring every dataset to be fully reorganised first.

The larger issue is trust and governance. Agencies need confidence that data sharing is lawful, secure, ethical and aligned to purpose. This requires frameworks that clarify permissions, decision rights, risk ownership and assurance expectations.

Consultation Can Become Theatre

One participant made a sharp observation about the “theatre” of consultation. In fast-moving environments, consultation may become a box-ticking exercise rather than a genuine design input. When people experience this repeatedly, they become less willing to participate in future collaboration.

This is a serious risk for transformation programs. Collaboration depends on trust, and trust erodes when stakeholders feel they are being asked for input after decisions have effectively already been made.

The corrective is genuine partnership. Participants from Transport and Main Roads described the importance of creating “win-win” solutions that serve both corporate and operational areas. This reframes collaboration from compliance to mutual value.

5. Actionable Outcomes

Immediate Actions

Clarify decision rights early.

For any cross-functional or cross-agency initiative, teams should identify who can make which decisions, what needs escalation and where unresolved trade-offs will land. This reduces the risk of collaboration becoming a discussion without authority.

Fund participation, not just delivery.

If agencies are expected to collaborate, their time and contribution need to be recognised. This is particularly important for cross-agency initiatives where one agency may carry costs that primarily benefit another part of government.

Use mission-based framing.

Initiatives should be framed around shared outcomes rather than agency-owned outputs. Disaster response, COVID coordination and 2032 planning show that mission clarity gives people permission to work beyond boundaries.

Create practical reuse forums.

Participants noted that agencies often share learnings informally, especially around AI pilots such as Microsoft Copilot. These exchanges should be made easier and more visible, with templates, playbooks and lessons learned available across agencies.

Medium-Term Goals

Develop repeatable collaboration playbooks.

The Future Government Institute’s ambition to codify patterns into toolkits and frameworks directly addresses a recurring need. Government does not need more abstract collaboration principles. It needs reusable models for funding, governance, data sharing, decision rights and risk allocation.

Build enterprise capability without crushing local context.

Participants recognised the need for reusable platforms, common architectural patterns and shared data standards. However, these must be designed with operational realities in mind. Enterprise capability should reduce duplication while still allowing agencies to meet specific service obligations.

Strengthen cross-agency talent models.

The DTA secondment model for AI standards provides a strong example. Similar approaches could be applied to digital identity, cyber resilience, data governance, service design and automation. Rotations and secondees build both capability and trust.

Embed agile governance into major programs.

Where outcomes are urgent or complex, governance should support rapid cycles of decision-making, evidence and adjustment. The 100-day delivery team model described by Brisbane City Council offers one example of how organisations can force productive collaboration around defined problems.

Long-Term Vision

Move from Government 2.0 to Government 3.0.

The broader transformation goal is to shift from fragmented digital services to connected, horizontal government. This requires more than apps, portals and digital forms. It requires a connected substrate of data, identity, platforms, governance and trust.

Create systems thinkers across the public sector.

Participants repeatedly returned to the need for broader practitioner capability. Digital transformation cannot depend only on senior executives or specialist technology teams. Public servants across policy, operations, procurement, finance, data and service delivery need to understand how their decisions affect the system as a whole.

Align incentives to citizen outcomes.

Ultimately, citizens experience government as one system, even when agencies experience it as many organisations. Shared reputation, shared outcomes and shared service journeys should become stronger drivers of investment and accountability.

6. Conclusion

The discussion made clear that collaboration is both essential and structurally difficult. Government leaders do not need to be convinced that collaboration matters. They need operating models that make it practical, funded, safe and repeatable.

The strongest examples — disaster response, COVID coordination, digital licensing, AI standards, 2032 planning and cross-agency pilots — show that government can collaborate effectively when the mission is clear and the system gives permission. The task now is to translate those exceptional conditions into everyday practice.

Future research should explore how governments can design shared-risk frameworks, fund cross-agency participation, build reusable collaboration playbooks and develop system-wide digital capability. The opportunity is not simply to improve individual projects. It is to build the operating system for Government 3.0: connected, horizontal, outcome-led and trusted.