Client & Challenge
The Digital Transformation Office (now called: Digital Transformation Agency) in Australia aims to improve people’s experience of government services. This means improving skills in government and helping agencies create services that are simple, clear and fast - making it easy for citizens to deal with government.
The DTA approached Fjord to help them deliver The Digital Marketplace - a procurement platform where government buyers define their requirements, and big and small businesses can respond to provide specialist digital services to government.
How might we make it easier easier for smaller businesses to compete for the government’s $6 billion a year spend on information and communications technology (ICT) products and services?
We were asked to follow the DTA’s Digital Service Standard (DSS), and in less than 20 weeks, co-deliver a working beta.
What we did and delivered
The DTA’s Digital Service Standard (DSS) is an iterative human centered approach approach with 4 key stages.
During ‘Discovery’ we explored the needs of buyers and sellers of services in the government marketplace through speaking to users, and deepened our understanding of policy and technology and constraints.
During ‘Alpha ‘we tested hypotheses by building prototypes in code to explore different ways of meeting users’ needs. We did more qualitative user research to learn which approach works best and iterated our solutions in response to what we learned.
During ‘Beta’ we built on what we learned from Alpha to arrive at Minimum viable product. We are now in ‘Live’.
The Digital Marketplace is a simple and fast way to buy and sell with government. It breaks down the barriers of entry for SMEs (a small to medium enterprise with less than 200 employees) and makes it easier to compete for the Australian Government’s annual ICT spend.
Homepage
Seller catalogue
Opportunities
Impact
The fastest development of a live public Beta prototype in the DTO’s history, over 240 Suppliers and 170 Government Buyers signed up in the first few weeks.
The Digital Market Place is truly ‘living’ service and brings about new definitions about what it means to be ‘live’. The DTA continues to measure the impact of the Digital Market Place, ever-evolving to meet changing user needs.
At last check: user satisfaction 74%, digital take-up 31%, completion rate 74%.
Impact - activity on the marketplace
Impact - competition to drive innovation
