ATO IT strategy
summary
> agile and intelligent in a digital world
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Influences on the ATO IT strategy
Our new leadership team is
driving a transformational
program, reinventing
the ATO to realise our
newly articulated vision,
mission and values. This
program challenges our
thinking about concepts
such as compliance
and participation, the
client experience, being
contemporary, and
managing the pressures
of being a useful and
sustainable large public
service organisation. Our
IT strategy is a key element
to underpin and help drive
this transformation.
Building on a strong foundation, we
are reinventing the way we work
to respond to the expectations of
the community and government.
At a practical level, reinventing the
ATO will result in a different culture,
new products and services, strong
connections to the community,
productivity improvements and a
willingness to change.
Our clients expect to receive our
services in the way they interact
with other service organisations –
at a time and place that is
convenient for them and allows
them to employ their preferred
channel. They expect us to
understand their previous
interactions and tailor our services
and responses accordingly. Our
solutions need to evolve and keep
pace with changes in community
expectations and needs.
Increasing the productivity of our
economy is a key challenge facing
Australia.The costs businesses
incur in dealing with government,
including the ATO, impact on
their ability to run and grow
their business. The Australian
Government has committed to
building a stronger, more productive
economy by imposing a red-andgreen-tape target reduction of
$1 billion a year.
Globalisation is now affecting
small to medium businesses,
and this is increasing the
complexity of the financial affairs
of businesses, challenging the
ability of intermediaries and
increasing risk in the tax system.
Government agencies are expected
to work together to improve
the delivery of services to all
Australians. We are called on to
adopt a digital by default, manual by
exemption, approach aligned with
the government’s Digital First policy
and programs such as myGov.
The Australian Public Service
Commission capability review
systematically examined our
organisational capability and
identified five priority areas for
improvement – developing a
forward-looking, enterprise-wide
strategy; developing ICT efficiency
and agility; building the future
workforce; streamlining governance
arrangements and structures; and
improving external connectedness.
The global IT environment still
sees increasingly rapid advances
in technologies such as analytics,
social, mobile and cloud. Our IT
strategy needs to trace a path for
us to drive value from these trends.
We will need to deliver our
transformational change in an
extremely tight fiscal environment.
The transformation agenda
cannot be our sole focus – it is
critically important that we ensure
the stability and performance
of our production systems and
that we successfully deliver the
government’s policy agenda.
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IT strategy focus areas
Building agility, intelligence
and efficiency is at the heart
of our IT strategy, and will
direct how we invest, design
and deliver our services. It
will guide how we operate
internally to effectively
manage change, and how
we work as a professional
and productive organisation
in delivering our products
and services to our internal
and external clients.
Our IT strategy will enable us
to deliver and improve our core
activities and help transform
the client experience, focused
on building the right technology
capabilities, operating environment
and culture, and supporting the
changes to our business as it
transforms into a truly digital
enterprise. It will be an environment
where information is collected,
shared and managed as a dynamic
corporate asset, and is used to
provide contemporary digital
services and a tailored experience
to the community.
Our strategic focus areas are:
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End-to-end digital service
delivery
Insight and intelligence
Digital working environment
Reinventing how our IT
services operate.
End-to-end digital service delivery
People expect
convenient, integrated
and accessible interactions
in their dealings with a
contemporary service
organisation. Increasing
stakeholder expectations
to interact digitally with
the ATO and government is
driving the need to provide
more contemporary
tailored services. To achieve
this, we will design and
deliver digital services ‘as
though the paper process
had never existed’.
We will move:
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From accepting lodgments
digitally to servicing the full
customer experience digitally
end-to-end
From siloed channels to
seamlessly integrated channels
From one size fits all to
personalised situation-aware
services tailored to the
customer’s unique situation and
needs
From ATO-designed services to
inclusive co-design with the full
range of internal and community
stakeholders
From ATO-centric service
delivery to fully integrated wholeof-government digital services.
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In the future, we aim to:
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Design from the customerexperience perspective first
Enable low- or no-touch
experience through integration
with customer natural systems
and using our own and thirdparty data holdings
Consider designing for the
mobile platform first – this
is increasingly the preferred
channel for users
Support seamless channel
switching in mid-interaction – for
example, from online self-service
to web chat
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Evolve our services in pace
with evolving community
expectations and in line with
digital services provided
by other leading service
organisations
Use our knowledge of the
customer’s situation and
previous interactions with us to
increase the effectiveness of our
processes by tailoring service
and compliance offers
Take advantage of emerging
trends in information technology
to keep ourselves closer to the
forefront – to become an early
adopter
Prototype new services with a
‘succeed or fail fast’ mindset
Reduce over time the customer
reliance on face-to-face, hightouch, and paper channels
Take more advantage of
wholesale service offerings
in which ATO functionality
is embedded in third-party
software products.
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Insight and intelligence
Our data is an enterprise
asset and we must use it
to make better decisions
for compliance and
service delivery based
on deep understanding
of what drives taxpayer
behaviour and of potential
vulnerabilities in the
tax and superannuation
systems. It is also about
deriving predictive insight
and enhanced intelligence
from our data asset.
We will move:
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From holding data in silos to
enabling the whole enterprise to
leverage our holdings
From using our analytics to
report on what has occurred to
predicting and influencing what
is likely to occur
From overnight batch to right
time analytics
From tightly holding our data to
sharing and publishing datasets
for whole-of-government and
public use
From disaggregated data
holdings to integrated ones with
reliable quality assurance.
In the future, we aim to:
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Create a data warehouse
dedicated to exploratory
analysis and intelligence
investigations
Support each client contact
with information on previous
interactions, and the risk profile
of the customer, to enable
more effective engagement and
service delivery
Embed our insight into
processes to ‘nudge’
behaviour through proactive
communications
Increase our ability to effectively
use unstructured data and
social media feeds
Use our information to quickly
identify and better manage
new and emerging risks and
intelligence.
Unlock the value of our
information holdings to better
serve business and stakeholder
needs
Increase our use of, and
integration with, third-party data
sources
Continue to assure the security
and integrity of our data
Simplify client experience by
directly gathering information
from normal economic
interactions, such as payroll
and point of sale rather than
requiring separate lodgment
processes.
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Digital working environment
As we move toward our
vision, the ATO workforce
will undergo a transition
from mainly transaction
and exception processing
to a greater focus on
knowledge work –
delivering outcomes
by leveraging tools and
information. This change
will require new ways of
working that are enabled
through technology and
robust knowledge
management.
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We will move:
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From basic desktop
collaboration tools to rich
collaboration environments
that will modernise the way
people work
From in-house only collaboration
tools to capabilities that
link us to other government
departments, and even the
community, allowing a range of
conferencing, work sharing and
consultation facilities
From a standard one size fits all
computer offering to a suite of
offerings customised to support
the nature of people’s work and
preferences
From limited support for
working out of the office to
high-performing and reliable
external access to the full range
of ATONet services from any
internet-connected device,
anywhere, any time.
In the future, we aim to:
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Provide federated search
capabilities across important
ATO data holdings
Create a social mediastyle intranet that supports
following people, websites and
organisations
Provide the technology for
flexible and customised working
arrangements, including bring
your own device and software
options
Leverage social networking by
implementing ‘enterprise social’
solutions
Provide knowledgemanagement and decisionsupport solutions to assist
people in consistently delivering
on more complex work
Have the means to integrate our
work with stakeholders in the
community.
Reinventing how our IT services operate
To deliver on the focus areas
described, we must reinvent
the way we operate. We
must reinvent the way we
work to respond to the
expectations of the business
and community. At a
practical level transforming
our IT organisation will
result in a different culture,
streamlined processes,
new technologies, stronger
connections to our
stakeholders, productivity
improvements and an
openness and willingness
to change.
We will move:
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From all work going through the
same large-scale governance
and methodology to applying
more agile approaches, where
the risk level and required
outcomes allow
From complex, opaque
processes with multiple decision
points and unclear decision
rights to streamlined processes
with clear decision rights and
accountabilities
From being a late adopter of
new technologies to being
willing to experiment, prototype
and ‘fail fast and iterate’
From delivering projects to
delivering programs and
portfolios of work that produce
desired business outcomes.
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To deliver on the strategy our
people aim to:
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Operate within an environment
of constant change, wholeof-enterprise awareness, and
stakeholder partnership
Maintain an appropriate focus
on business-as-usual and
production systems, while
directing significant resources to
our reinvention agenda
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Provide customers with the
ability to access our systems at
a time that suits them
Strengthen leadership, shape
a culture of stakeholder
partnership, engagement and
performance
Shape demand through
benefits-realisation techniques
to prioritise the most valuable
work and to manage programs
through to target outcomes
Stop projects when the forecast
outcomes won’t be met
Build solutions that solve the
whole business requirement,
reducing the need for manual
workarounds
Focus recruitment, sourcing
and workforce development to
build the necessary capabilities,
expertise and skills
Operate transparently and ‘show
back’ the costs and implications
of the work we are asked to do
to our business partners
Engage, communicate and
change.
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Managing the change
Strong management and
governance will ensure that
our IT strategy achieves
sustained organisational
value, and that we are
making the best use of
available funding and
resources.
Alignment of the implementation
of the IT strategy with broader ATO
priorities will be achieved through:
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IT Governance – employing
a risk-based governance
framework that considers both
performance and conformance
through corporate governance
processes, corporate financial
management, and effective
management of information and
knowledge.
IT Financial Management – to
provide financial management,
procurement and assurance
we will:
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embed strong financial
management
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drive improvements in
departmental budget and
forecast management
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manage our current year
expenditure within budget
and position ourselves
for a sustainable financial
outcome in future years.
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IT Principles – guide and
influence how strategic
decisions are made, and ensure
that our IT priorities remain
aligned to those of the broader
ATO.
Performance Metrics – align
the IT metrics and measures
of success with the ATO
measures, at both the strategic
and operational level. We will
embed these measures in our
relationships and contracts with
industry partners.
Our headline measures include:
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IT contribution to the delivery of
the reinventing the ATO program
Delivery of new and refreshed
IT services
Availability and reliability of IT
services (increased)
Transparency in planned and
actual spend of IT portfolio
budget.
Agile and
intelligent in
a digital world
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ato.gov.au
Published by
Australian Taxation Office
July 2014