Chapter 8 will explore Operations as the state that covers the entire lifecycle of digital or ICT investments, providing vital data and technical foundations to enable the IOF. It will analyse the state’s strengths in using the Australian Government Architecture as a foundation for digital and ICT systems, collecting meaningful data for better insights, and developing the Integrated Data Platform for a more integrated IOF. It will also analyse the opportunities for the state to clarify its role within the IOF and strengthen its role in advancing technology adoption across government.
Digital Government in Australia
Enhancing Digital Investment
Abstract
Operations is a state that runs end-to-end across the lifecycle of a digital or ICT investment. It includes the use of the Australian Government Architecture (AGA) as a foundation for digital and ICT systems, meaningful data collection for better insights into the investment and technology landscapes, and work on the Integrated Data Platform (IDP) for a more integrated IOF. There is an opportunity to strengthen its Operations state by clarifying the role of the state and strengthening its role in advancing the use of technology across the public administration.
Operations is a state that runs end-to-end across the lifecycle of a digital or ICT investment. This is because it is primarily focussed on the collection and analysis of data to support decision-making, as well as the ways in which technology can be used by the DTA and agencies in the delivery of the IOF. While the state considers data from multiple sources, it predominantly uses regular Wave reporting (see Box 8.1) to develop intelligence on the size, health and maturity of Australia’s investment landscape (DTA, 2023[1]; DTA, 2024[2]):
adoption of emerging technology and trends.
reuse and shared capabilities.
personnel allocation, skills demand and workforce pressures.
lead and lag indicators of delivery confidence and project success.
profile balance between innovation, growth and maintenance investment.
The data helps to identify trends, patterns, and correlations that provide insights to inform the (DTA, 2023[1]; DTA, 2024[2]):
states of the IOF – from planning and policy development, through to Budget processes and assurance activities.
AGA’s current direction based on the effectiveness of its application and future guardrails for best technology implementation.
identification of new and emerging technologies that the AGA may need to support with guidance or guardrails to ensure their successful implementation across government.
analysis for agencies’ decision and policymaking for digital and ICT investments.
understanding of digital skills and capability gaps faced by government.
These insights provide an important evidence base from which to provide strategic advice to the Government, as well as other key decision-making bodies for the public administration, including the Secretaries’ Data and Digital Committee and Digital Leadership Committee (DTA, 2023[1]; DTA, 2024[2]).
Another important feature of the Operations state is its use of the AGA to provide a hierarchy of domains, capabilities, policies, standards and designs that give a model through which to build a common view of the technological landscape across government. This is important to be able to guide the development of digital and ICT investment proposals, as well as to be able to identify where they need to be improved.
Finally, the Operations state also plays an important role as an enabler of the IOF – undertaking key projects to improve the integration and efficiency of the system, like the IDP project (see Box 8.2) that will deliver a centralised case management solution to improve the integration and data flows required for more streamlined and integrated processes, which should also improve relationship management, decision-making, and assessment and oversight. The aim is for the platform to provide a better user experience for both the internal and external users interacting across the IOF.
The strengths of the Operations state include its use of the AGA as a foundation for digital and ICT systems, meaningful data collection for better insights into the investment and technology landscapes, and work on the Integrated Data Platform for a more integrated IOF.
AGA as a foundation for digital and ICT systems
With its hierarchy of domains, capabilities, policies, standards and designs, the AGA provides a strong foundation from which agencies can build their digital and ICT systems – much like an enterprise architecture for digital government. As part of the Operations state, the DTA has invested considerable effort in developing this architecture based on the knowledge it has gathered around existing systems, emerging technologies, and international good practice. As highlighted under Strategic Planning, the AGA therefore provides a common language for digital and ICT investments that is valuable in offering guidance to agencies and in identifying areas of proposals that require additional development to ensure a high-quality digital or ICT proposal.
Meaningful data collection for better insights
At the Operations state, the DTA has an established process for collecting consistent and regular data from agencies – primarily through Wave reporting (see Box 8.1) – that provide meaningful insights into Australia’s investment and technology landscapes. This data collection ensures that there are timely insights to identify trends, patterns, and correlations across the ecosystem that the DTA needs to inform its work on the IOF. While external and internal stakeholders did highlight that the collection could be burdensome on agencies and duplicative with other inputs across the IOF, the Business as Usual Wave reporting is moving to a digital platform that should streamline the process, which will also be complemented by the work on the IDP (see Box 8.2) to minimise data reporting and better integrate what is already being collected by the DTA. Having a single state of the IOF focussed on both projects simultaneously will help to identify synergies that will deliver a better user experience for internal and external users. External stakeholders also raised that there would be value in demonstrating in how the data is used in order improve the buy-in from agencies to provide quality reporting.
The Approved Programs Collection, also known as ‘Wave’, routinely collects data from agencies about their digital and ICT investments – either as Business as Usual (BAU) or Project collection.
The BAU collection provides insights into expenditure on digital talent, annual expenditure, and risks and opportunities around emerging technologies. In 2025, the DTA will be trialling the BAU collection via a new online portal.
The Project collection provides insights on the benefits, delivery approach, scope, and strategic alignment of projects over $10m. This helps to understand lead and lag indicators of project success to inform the other states of the IOF and help earlier identification of risks and projects requiring escalation.
This Wave reporting also helps to identify trends, patterns, and correlations, leading to strategic decisions that assure millions, if not billions, of dollars.
Source: (DTA, 2023[1]; DTA, 2024[2]; DTA, 2025[3])
Enabling a more integrated IOF with the Integrated Data Platform (IDP)
In digitalising the IOF, work is underway – led by the teams at the Operations state – to develop an IDP (see Box 8.2) that will improve the integration and data flows required for more streamlined and integrated processes, which should also improve relationship management, decision-making, and assessment and oversight. The implementation of the platform will be a significant milestone in the evolution of the IOF – delivering a better user experience for internal and external users of the IOF by minimising data entry, connecting data across the states, and by providing a single view of the ‘customer’.
The IDP is currently being developed and implemented in an iterative way, which the Assurance state already onboarded to platforms and plans to onboard the rest of the IOF state-by-state. This helps to ensure that the end solution will be fit-for-purpose, but the team is also approaching it in a way that means that – even if the implementation of the platform needs to stop at any point – that the onboarded states will still have a fully-functional digital platform that will modernise their operations.
The IDP is a digital case management solution that is being developed for a more modern, streamlined, and integrated IOF. As a Customer Relationship Management tool, this would see the DTA’s teams across the states using the IDP to track an investment end-to-end as a case in the system, which would minimise the need for duplicative data entry and additional documentation to be submitted as proposals make their way through the IOF.
With these cases linked to the responsible agency and portfolio in the system, this will also give the IOF a single view of the ‘customer’ for more centralised information that is relevant for the assessment of proposals (including their history of proposals) and more targeted engagement to uplift agencies’ capability and compliance with the IOF.
The aim is to complement the solution with GenAI (inc. Commercial-Off-the-Shelf (COTS) solutions like Copilot) to help extract information from documents, analyse the data being collected across the states, and derive insights over time of the history and trends of investment. Once fully-implemented, the idea is that the IDP will also have a digital frontend for agencies to input data more easily and in a more consistent format – improving the quality of data over time.
Source: Information provided in data collected and fact-finding interviews, 2024.
As the DTA looks to further develop the IOF, there is an opportunity to strengthen its Operations state by clarifying the role of the state, strengthening its role in advancing the use of technology across the public administration, and in creating a publicly-available overview of investments.
Clarify the role of Operations in the IOF
The Operations state could benefit from clarification of the role it plays in the IOF – providing an understanding of what it does now, but also the ways that it could be better used in the future. Amongst stakeholders, there was a view that the state was either just a data collection or an enabling function for the rest of the states of the IOF to help them make better use of technology and data to support them in the delivery of the IOF. Additionally, there was uncertainty around the overlap of the Operations and Strategic Planning states – particularly with the responsibility for the AGA and with considerations of legacy systems and new capabilities that are being assessed as part of the investment plans and horizon scanning.
Therefore, one option could be for the DTA to bolster the state’s role as the ‘technical advisor’ to the IOF – both internally and externally – which could see Operations brought into the other states to provide technical expertise, identify risks with the use of existing technologies and systems, and uncover opportunities to leverage new capabilities to advance the digital transformation of the public administration. Another suggestion was also to have the Operations state provide relationship management and horizontal oversight as agencies interact with the various states of the IOF for their digital and ICT investments – providing a single view of the ‘customer’ across the IOF.
Strengthen its role in advancing technology adoption
Based on the insights from stakeholders, there is an opportunity to strengthen the role of the Operations state in advancing the use of technology across the public administration. This is based on the recent work undertaken with the other states to explore how AI could be used to innovate and simplify the collection of data from agencies to reduce the administrative burden on them in complying with the requirements of the IOF. Within the DTA, there is also an opportunity to continue to test AI and the ways in which it could harvest and analyse additional data points to supplement the work of AI (e.g. from publicly available reporting and documentation). Both could build on the DTA’s recent whole-of-government trial into generative AI, which saw Microsoft 365 Copilot tested and evaluated by over 7,600 staff across more than 60 agencies across the public administration (DTA, 2024[4]). Therefore, the DTA could strengthen Operations’ role in advancing the adoption and use of technology across government, including by continuing to test AI and the ways in which it could harvest and analyse additional data points to supplement the work of AI. This could include greater integration with the Sourcing state as part of a possible GovTech function, as well as with technical guidance on the procurement of AI.
Create a publicly-available overview of investments
The Operations state could help to further improve the maturity of Australia’s approach to digital government investments by supporting the development of a publicly-available overview of investments. This is linked to the findings of the 2023 DGI, which highlighted the need for Australia to publish publicly-available data on the progress of digital and ICT projects in real time. Since the 2023 DGI, the DTA has published an annual Major Digital Projects Report in 2024 and 2025 to provide a comprehensive update of the state of the investment portfolio, including investment trends across government and an overview of the major in-flight projects and their scope, budget, timeline, and delivery status (Australian Government, 2025[5]).
However, there could be value in having a more regular update on the status of projects, which could take the form of an ‘investment dashboard’, which is updated regularly and can be used by various stakeholders to monitor the status and impact of digital and ICT investments across government. This would improve transparency and accountability, as well as provide an incentive for agencies to provide better quality reporting to the DTA to improve how their investments are reported online. While there are expected to be limitations on what can be released publicly due to confidentiality and Cabinet requirements, there could still be efforts to determine how this could be done within these limitations.
This reporting would be in line with the regular reporting to Government on the status of major digital projects across portfolios that is currently done in the Assurance state. However, similar to the IDP project, this would represent the delivery of a digital platform in support of the IOF that would benefit from automated data ingestion – where possible and appropriate to do so – which would benefit from this initiative being managed by the Operations state.
One example of such a dashboard is with France’s panorama of major digital projects, which is described in Box 8.3 below:
Every six months, DINUM publishes an overview of France's major digital projects. It identifies and describes the most strategic or sensitive digital and ICT projects within the State, which includes all projects with a value above EUR 9 million. This panorama provides a consolidated view of these major projects, along with aggregated budgetary indicators and any signs of planning slippage. In addition to promoting transparency and accountability, the reporting allows DINUM to monitor and make decisions about certain projects to improve their performance and ensure that they meet the needs of the users.
In its next iteration, the panorama will also include data on the expected impact of the project.
Source: (DINUM, 2024[6])
References
[5] Australian Government (2025), Major Digital Projects Report, https://www.digital.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2025-03/2025%20Major%20Digital%20Projects%20Report.pdf.
[6] DINUM (2024), Panorama des grands projets numériques de l’État, https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/publications/panorama-grands-projets-si/.
[3] DTA (2025), Approved Programs Data Collection Portal, https://datacollection.digital.gov.au/.
[4] DTA (2024), Evaluation of whole-of-government trial into generative AI: Now available, https://www.dta.gov.au/blogs/evaluation-whole-government-trial-generative-ai-now-available.
[2] DTA (2024), Operations, https://www.dta.gov.au/help-and-advice/digital-and-ict-investments/operations.
[1] DTA (2023), Harnessing the Wave: Insightful Data Collection in Digital and ICT Government Expenditure – the Operations state, https://www.dta.gov.au/blogs/harnessing-wave-insightful-data-collection-digital-and-ict-government-expenditure-operations-state.