Services Australia has begun scouring the market for a suite of customer experience (CX) applications to form part of the federal government’s new Facebook-inspired digital services platform.
In a request for expressions of interest released on Friday, the agency went looking for what it is calling the “core CX capabilities” for the government digital experience platform (GOVDXP).
GOVDXP – which is slated to eventually replace the eight-year-old existing myGov portal – promises to give citizens a single, personalised view of their interactions with the government.
Deloitte has spent the past year developing the platform in line with the Digital Transformation Agency’s requirements at a cost of $30 million, despite the initial contract coming in at $1 million.
A beta version of the platform currently runs in parallel with myGov, though its functionality is currently limited as it is yet to be integrated with other services from Services Australia or the Tax Office.
Following the initial work, Services Australia is now seeking to understand the capability and costs associated with “longer-term advancement of the myGov service ecosystem underpinned by a DXP”.
“The beta development has enabled government to understand how to integrate bespoke agency systems into a modern and scalable platform,” expressions of interest documents state.
Services Australia – which will eventually operate GOVDXP like it does the existing myGov portal – is calling for software for three capabilities: content management, experience delivery and experience analytics.
Service providers will be able to provide software that meets all three requirements (bundle b), content management and experience delivery requirements (bundle a) or just analytics (bundle c).
Together, the bundles will form the “experience management platform” – a key component of the overall platform (“DXP Core”), according to a blueprint of GOVDXP and its proposed channels.
GOVDXP, as well as the Australia.gov.au website that it is based on, is currently underpinned by Adobe Experience Manager.
“The capabilities will need to be able to provide frontend customer facing applications, mobile applications and APIs,” the expressions of interest states.
“The capabilities will be required in tandem with required internal microservices potentially behind (or in front) of an API gateway depending on final approved architecture patterns.
“This mandates that most, if not all of the capabilities offered should provide mechanisms in which they can be queried, executed and controlled via an industry standard API."
The content management capability will provide the processes and technologies necessary to support digital content, namely a CMS service capable of integrating with other workflow engines.
Under the experience delivery capability, the service provider will design and deliver the customer experience, including personalising the customer’s journey based on their past platform usage.
The analytics capability will provide the data analytics to analyse customer interactions, which will include giving agencies the ability to “access customer session replays of digital service transitions”.
Each capability area will need to support up to 2.7 million users, including 500,000 concurrent users each day, though normal operation will sit well below this (500,000 users, 75,000 concurrent).
The expected capacity is higher than the existing myGov platform, which sits at around 300,000 concurrent users after it was upgraded from 55,000 last year in response to the pandemic.
“The existing myGov service averages 500,000 logins daily, with daily peaks at 2.7 million logins,” the expressions of interest documents state, adding that 130 million myGov Inbox mail items are sent each year.
“It is expected that these capacity levels are maintained through the deployment of the proposed DXP, with up to 10% increases in users annually.”
Service Australia will hold a briefing for the work on February 12. It plans to proceed to the second stage of the procurement in March.
