After handing Deloitte another $4.5 million to expand the latest incarnation of its myGov citizen services portal, Services Australia is seeking a new partner to add on a Netflix-style, “core customer experience” capability.
With the new myGov still in beta – and, for now, still running alongside the old myGov platform – the platform lacks integration with key government services, including the Australian Tax Office.
This next phase of work will focus on “longer-term advancement of the myGov service ecosystem”, tender documents state.
The Request for Expression of Interest (REOI) released by the government seeks one or multiple contractors to provide a Digital Experience Platform (DXP), incorporating core customer experience capabilities within the new myGov platform.
The chosen DXP would integrate a number of currently separate government functions, many provided by separate agencies, helping customers navigate through life experiences (for example, the birth of a child or the death of a loved one) within a single platform.
It would therefore need to integrate with customer portals, APIs, and experience application components, as well as industry-standard authentication providers such as OAuth and OpenID.
The new solution is expected to provide customers with a personalised experience, with scope for “continuous optimisation”. For instance, the service provider should be able to present “a customised user experience based on geospatial, device, demographic or behavioural segmentation”.
As part of the tender conditions, the Government may choose to proceed with one responder or split the work into bundles.
Prospective applicants will either need to apply to provide solutions for a bundled approach, including content management and experience delivery only or experience analytics only, or management of the entire approach.
Overall, the DXP should be able to support up to 500,000 users per day, as well as “surge capacity” for up to 2.7 million users during peak periods in case of emergencies, such as announcements around Covid-19 developments or bushfires.
The platform will also need to have the ability to publish announcements, such as banners and notifications, based on the context of the user.
Meanwhile, experience analytics should provision data teams with “valuable insights”, taking advantage of the customer data being collected.
Data should be utilised immediately to “improve and optimise a customer’s digital experience” as they use the platform.
Over the past year, Deloitte has been the key supplier and developer for the revised myGov platform. Most of its work has focused around the development of the beta platform, which has included personalised content, streamlined login access, a web-based myGov inbox, and opt-in notifications.
This third and final stage of development will see the platform developed into a more customised service portal, with a personalised dashboard modelled off consumer services like Netflix.
Within this dashboard, customers will see the applications most relevant to them based on recent interactions they have had with government or on specific life events.
This final stage will see an integration layer sit over myGov’s systems, allowing information to “flow back and forth” between the myGov website and myGov systems, the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA), which oversees the rollout, noted in the tender.
Predictably, the chosen software partner would need to have a proven record of successfully undertaking similar partnerships for platforms “of a similar scale and complexity to the proposed DXP”.
The partner should also be able to scale the platform sufficiently to accommodate future growth, and have the ability to develop and support enhancements to the software as needed.
The REOI is open until 3 March, after which time respondents will then be invited to participate in a Request for Proposal (RFP) process.
