The government wants all federal services to be available online by 2025

The federal government wants to become one of the top-three digital governments in the world and have all services available online by 2025.

A new digital government strategy highlights the Australian public service will adopt a “digital first” mindset to government service delivery to achieve the goal.

The government plans to measure success through the OECD Digital Government Index, which placed South Korea, the UK, Columbia, Denmark and Japan among the top performers in 2019.

“The strategy builds on previous success and achievements in accelerating the transformation of government, made possible due to the hard work and commitment across the public service,” Digital Transformation Agency chief Chris Fechner said in a foreword to the strategy.

“We need to maintain this momentum and continue working together to achieve our goal of being one of the top three digital governments in the world by 2025.”

The strategy also aims to make digital services easy to access and people and business centred.

The government earlier this year moved the Digital Transformation Agency back to a central portfolio in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, which had previously housed the agency.

A parliamentary inquiry into public service capability found last month that ICT capacity was “severely lacking”. It expressed disappointment with a lack of progress following findings in a landmark 2019 review that the APS was not keeping pace with increasing public expectations for digital technology.

Digital Minister Stuart Robert said in a statement that departments and agencies would need to work together to achieve the goal of the new strategy.

“We must be pulling in the same direction, it will be our laser-like focus to make sure that happens,” Robert said.

One change will see the Digital Transformation Agency provide oversight of digital and ICT investments across the entire lifecycle of projects.

Another change will see a whole-of-government architecture providing standards guidance, products and tools to support APS agencies designing digital capability.

The government this week will invite businesses to register their interest in accreditation under its Trusted Digital Identity Framework or to participate in a Digital Identity System.

This article was first published by The Mandarin.