Digital transformations for a modern Aotearoa New Zealand

After several years of chaos, disruptions and crises, 2022 was the first year since 2019 that much of the world returned to some sort of normality. For Aotearoa New Zealand, being a small country with a small population, that normality quickly settled in, and although many changes forced by the pandemic are still in place, and there are still some ongoing residual pandemic issues, including hybrid working and a greater use of technology across most industries, the pandemic is largely seen as a recent and confronting memory, but nonetheless something that is now firmly in the rear view mirror.

The case studies in this whitepaper show how innovative transformations can positively affect the various agencies of the NZ public service. But they also show that the agencies already had the know-how and expertise within them to make these changes possible. Each agency identified their own strengths and barriers, and used their internal capacity to make things better. It is important that these are not isolated examples but are replicated across the entire public sector. After all, the Strategy for a Digital Public Service is all about ‘working together to shift to a modern digital public service. While functional leadership plays an important role in signalling and embedding the necessary system changes, our ongoing digital success will be a collective effort.’ Each agency needs to look at how they can embed or enhance their digital initiatives in order create greater efficiencies. Together, Aotearoa New Zealand can become the digital public service that it needs to be to better look after all their customers.