Whole of Government

It has been more than three years since the MAC report, Connecting Government: Whole of Government Responses to Australia’s Priority Challenges, was released.¹ The report responded to the increasing demand for APS agencies and employees to focus beyond agency-specific outcomes and priorities to contribute to the Government’s overall policy agenda and priorities.

Since 2004, the focus on whole of government activities across the APS has intensified. Whole of government approaches have been implemented to address a wide range of issues, from crisis management, for example, the response to Cyclone Larry, to dealing with significant policy challenges, such as Indigenous well-being and welfare reform, to improving everyday service delivery, for example, better coordination between the service delivery agencies in the Human Services portfolio.

Despite the range of significant achievements in the area of whole of government, it is clear that this is still an area that the APS, and public services throughout Australia and internationally, find challenging. Significant effort has been invested in embedding whole of government ways of working in APS agencies. There is evidence of progress, but there is still a long way to go. Moving from a culture based on specific agency outcomes to one where whole of government considerations take prominence is a major cultural leap for the APS, and challenges our institutional framework on a number of fronts, including financial, governance and accountability, technology, and capability.

This is not surprising, when the scale of activities affected by a whole of government approach are considered. The contrast between old ways of working, and new, more collaborative approaches, are summarised in Table 10.1.

Table 10.1: Impact of collaborative approaches on APS activity
Old ways of working	New ways of working
Silo approach	Network approach
Focus on agency outcomes	Focus on whole of government outcomes
Respond to needs identified by the public service	Work with stakeholders and citizens to address genuine needs
Programmes managed within agencies	Problems and events managed across agencies
Focus on customers and individual transactions	Focus on citizens’ experiences across agencies
Highly specific agency outcomes and reporting	Shared outcomes and reporting
Emphasis on agency resources	Emphasis on cooperative resourcing
Reward and recognition for vertical management	Reward and recognition for vertical and horizontal management
Information ‘owned’ by agencies	Information sharing and cooperative knowledge management across agencies
Emphasis on agency leadership	Emphasis on shared leadership
Emphasis on agency identity and culture	Whole of government values incorporated into agency cultures
Capability development focused on agency-specific needs	Capability development includes focus on collaborative ways of working

This chapter provides a comprehensive assessment of the current state of play of whole of government working in the APS. It begins by looking at some of the key developments in whole of government approaches in 2006–07, both in Australia and internationally. It then looks in detail at APS performance, both in establishing effective whole of government systems and supportive culture and capability.

1 Management Advisory Committee 2004, Connecting Government: Whole of Government Responses to Australia’s Priority Challenges, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, <http://apsc.gov.au/mac>