The simplest form of digital transform is a replace a paper process or form with a digital version. The latter may be in the form of an app, an on-line web-based form, or even a kiosk.

Digital transformation has obvious benefits of convenience and speed for customers, and for the service provider process efficiency improvements as well as data quality improvements. No more erroneous electronic data-entry!

In terms of innovation and risk, a simple digital transformation can be very low-risk. But beware that you are not creating future problems!..

Upfront design of the service and customer experience remains vital!

While digital transformation may seem simple, the new digital process needs careful user experience design — there is nothing more frustrating for a customer to near the end of a lengthy data-entry process then be asked to provide a scanned copy of an obscure document that the customer doesn’t have on hand, only then to be forced to exit and lose all the data entry work.

Also it is important to provide alternatives for those not digitally literate or without access to the digital technology.

While digital transformation seems like a pretty safe, low risk, quick win project, don’t be fooled. Let’s work through an example applying some of my ‘new wave’ smart city principles.

The Digital Driver’s Licence Example

Most states in Australia have moved from a paper to a digital drivers licence. These are managed by the state government. The above mentioned benefits of customer convenience and productivity and efficiency improvements all apply. Furthermore there are knock-on benefits; since traditionally a driver’s licence is a key identification document, an electronic identity it has more uses than just providing permission to drive a vehicle.

What problem are we solving?..
We aren’t solving a problem at all!

If we change to digital driver’s licence, what problem are we solving? Traditional smart city ‘best practice’ tells us that our project must be able to answer the question, “What problem are we solving?” in this case, “What problem are we solving by moving from a paper version to a digital licence?” While you could try and shoehorn the innovation of going digital to solving a variety of ‘problems’ — “we are solving an inefficiency problem”, “we are removing hassle for customers” — the exercise won’t help our smart city mindsets. Rather, in this case we should be thinking, “What is the opportunity for excellence in customer experience” (for example) and not “problem solving”. An opportunity mindset becomes more and more important as we delve deeper into creating better futures and meeting more impactful smart city goals and pressing future challenges.

Problems focus on the past.

Opportunities force us to look to the future.

Solve the problem or dissolve the problem?
Innovation opportunities can dissolve problems… an innovation can unintentionally make a gnarly problem simply disappear.

Our driver’s licence digital transformation innovation doesn’t solve a problem — it focuses on a opportunity instead. This opportunity paradigm is key to a ‘new wave’ approach to rethinking smart cities. This doesn’t mean we ignore problems, but we do relegate them to a post-design checklist to see if they will still exist under the new design.

So what are the opportunities?

To improve customer experience with a vision to provide an excellent customer experience. Faster turn-arounds, more convenience etc.

To improve the productivity and efficiency of a back office processes, improving speed, quality and reducing costs.

A future-proofing review

Future-proofing is not crystal ball gazing, or just cool buzz words, it’s a key step as part of our ‘new wave’ innovation design process. If we get this wrong we will create unnecessary future pain and potential road blocks to future innovation.

I believe it will always help our a shift to a new wave mindset if review every opportunity from a future-proofing perspective. After all, if something is potentially future-proof, its definitely worth the effort to get it right the first time, or design the temporary version that is “good enough for now” with the final version in mind. That is, even though we may be constrained from building the full future-proof version we should at least create a draft blueprint of what the final version should look like so our temporary version can be upgraded or replaced without creating future pain.

While technology and the physical world is not future proof the intangibles such as excellence in customer experience and the world of information are often future-proof. A new wave smart city approach looks to explicitly identify future-proof elements of our innovation.

Applying future-proofing principles to the humble drivers licence

What does possessing a driver’s licence mean? It means that my state government has determined that Neil Temperley is qualified to driver a particular category of vehicle.

The some key information components a licence must ‘contain’ are:

1. Who does this licence concern?
   The personal identity of the licensee — me. It is tied to my identity and is not transferable to someone else.
2. Who endorses my ability to drive.
   The organsiational identity of the licensor — the State Government tested and endorses me.
3. What kind of activity and ability are we talking about?
   The qualification or permission the licence proves — I’m qualified to drive a vehicle.
4. What is the scope? In this case what kind of vehicle are we talking about? My licence covers passenger cars but not trucks, buses, or heavy machinery etc.

[Note for simplicity we’ll omit some other key information components on a driver’s licence like expiry date.]

The licence link these four high-level pieces of information together. It ties the individual (me) to the endorsing organisation (the government) and to the activity (driving) and to the scope of the licence — the type of vehicle (car).

The licence must tie these four things together in a way that is robust and very difficult to forge. If I want to hire a car, the rental company wants to know that these four pieces of information are accurate and true. In fact every time my driver’s licence is examined or put to some use, the other party needs to be able to trust that my licence is reliably and accurately linked back to these four things.

How future-proof are these four things — these key pieces of information? The answer is very! The vehicle may change to a hover board in the future but our licence taxonomy/framework doesn’t need to fundamentally change at all. We don’t have to fundamentally re-design apps and rebuild whole computer systems to manage a licence for hover boards. We just need to enter different data to the future-proof system framework. This is the power of future-proofing information design.

But our future-proofing insights don’t have to stop with the humble driver’s licence.

Personal Identity

Let’s look at item one: personal identity. My identity is important to almost every aspect of my business and societal interactions. It is vital to the concept of ownership and debt. Neil owns this car, Neil owns this house, Neil owes money to this bank, etc. We normally associate my unique identity with more detailed chunks of information such as my full name, my birth date, where I was born, the address where I live, what I look like etc.

So my identity, and the typical chunks of information used to establish my identity are future-proof and have changed little over the years.

My identity is important and is used in transactions of everyday life. My identity is not just useful for a drivers licence, it is important to every kind of licence I possess, and beyond that to every qualification I possess, and beyond that to just about every engagement and activity of my life. I don’t want to keep proving my identity at every turn by answering the same 20 questions. My digital identity that serves my drivers licence can serve many, many other uses. It is particularly attractive if my digital identity is harder to forge or ‘steal’ compared to my traditional paper- or plastic-based one.

Getting the identity part of my drivers licence right has far-reaching significance. The identity system should work nationally and even internationally.

The concept being able to ‘provide strong proof of my identity on request’ is future-proof with far-reaching implications and applications.

The licence concept

Similarly the whole concept of ‘a licence’ is very general and very future-proof. Think of all the different kinds of ‘licences’: drivers licence, crane driver’s licence, builder’s licence, diver’s licence, fishing licence, barrister’s licence, doctor’s licence, breeder’s licence, etc. Note also that a licence is just another form of certification or qualification, e.g. university degree, paramedic certification, quality inspector, building inspector, even a police badge.

All of these have the first three information elements in common: my personal identity, the endorsing organisation’s identity, and the qualification. Only the fourth item of scope varies.

• For example, my wife’s teaching degree ties the individual (my wife) to the endorsing organisation (her university) to the qualification (secondary school teaching) to the scope (languages).

• Another example is a COVID proof-of-vaccination. My digital vaccination certificate ties my identity, to the organisation(s) that gave me the injections, to the qualification/activity (my injection), to the scope/type (Astra Zenica and COVID-19).

Pushing the concept a bit the further, item one on our list can be expanded somewhat to cover even more variations on the theme. A licence doesn’t have to ‘belong’ to a person. It can belong to a thing with a person being the one responsible for it, such as its owner. For example, my boat trailer (the thing) has a road worthiness certificate (another kind of ‘licence’) and the person responsible is me.

A robot, such as an autonmous vehicle and its governing software needs a licence too!

And the concept of a licence doesn’t always apply just to individuals or individual things, organisations are licenced too, e.g. a licence to serve alcohol is granted to a business tied to an specific address, etc.

Futures and the vision

Though we started with the digital transformation of the humble plastic or paper driver’s licence a simple analysis has taken us down a path of the many, many applications of the concept or a licence, permit or qualification applied to individuals, things and organisations and the incredible importance of reliably establishing and proving identity for individuals, things and organisations!

Ideal futures and end-states

Note that we don’t have to start with the driver’s licence for this kind of customer-centric smart city analysis. We could have started with ideal futures and ideal end-states. For example if we brainstorm the subject of identity: What is the best most future-proof way of proving my identity in the future? How will we be doing it in the future? Rapid DNA testing is a likely possibility of the future… is providing a DNA sample the ultimate form of ID? Will that be acceptable to citizens? But perhaps DNA is overkill and provides more personal information than required? If user consultation we agree DNA identity is the ultimate and acceptable to citizens then we should be including it in our design blueprints now so our designs are both future ready and future-proof. You don’t address these tricky questions behind closed doors… rather you brainstorm co-create the answers with customers/citizens and stakeholders as part of a collaborative design process creating design blueprints.

Our blueprints mean we can build with confidence today what will integrate with the vision of tomorrow.

How often do we wait until the new technology is implemented before we discover a big problem and concern of customers? Our blueprints address this recurring innovation failing?

Notice that our analysis raises another key issue that must be addressed better sooner than later. In the future, how do we best prove the identity of an organisation or of a thing, e.g. my boat trailer, my car or maybe in the future an autonomous vehicle. This goal may drive our city R&D investment.

When it comes to smart city design the futures-driven approach has a big advantage over the digital transformation-driven approach; in the former, all the tough questions get asked early. But if we start with digital transformation we may stop our thinking and analysis too early. Stopping early, not brainstorming, not co-creating and not thinking things through is one of the biggest smart city failings which my ‘new wave’ approach seeks to overcome. The result of not thinking things through is that we will pay the cost in the future of running into problems we could have easily avoided.

A futures analysis forces early customer engagement and early difficult discussions around issues such as privacy.

A futures analysis avoids a lot of cost and pain — such as trying to win over customers after the system has been built

Getting it wrong

Its import not to skip or stop short with our futures analysis. Lets look at the driver’s licence example again.

When we look at the huge variety of licences, qualifications and permits that are relevant to our society we quickly realise that many have national (and even international) significance. While it may be reasonable for a state government to endorse or issue a particular licence the system needs to work seamlessly beyond state borders. An endemic problem in Australia is the fragmentation of incompatible digital systems that plagues almost every industry and creator of smart city solutions. We instruct our software engineers design separate incompatible digital systems then try and harmonise them at some later date — at huge cost — to get them to work.

One example is Australia’s lack of a national Port Community System (a system to facilitate data sharing amongst the 100s of industry stakeholders at sea ports) that is still lacking in Australia, though a known internationally as a productivity and efficiency benefit and has been discussed in Australia for over 10 years.

Our futures analysis forces us to acknowledge this problem and create designs that are compatible with meaningful integrated futures. Standards, though part of the solution are not the solution — the solution is a proper design process and blueprints that drive future requirements for national systems.

Getting ahead of the curve and dissolving future problems before they occur…

Sadly human nature is also future-proof. We will have people do the wrong thing from mental illness or plain old evil malicious intent. So often we can predict future risks based on past experience.

In the future if is reasonable to assume there will be lots of autonomous vehicles on the road. It’s reasonable to assume a mix of personal ownership and the ownership of fleets of vehicles. What happens when the owner of a fleet of vehicles ‘goes rogue’ or when a fleet is hacked (say by a hostile nation) and they ‘go rogue’. Perhaps fail-safe systems will prevent the vehicles deliberately colliding with other vehicles or pedestrians, but a fleet of vehicles operating in a swarm can easily catastrophically congest and jam roads without breaking safety rules. Such simple predictable scenarios align with human nature. So we know will happen at some point.

Because of the likelihood and high level of negative impact the risk is high. So when we think about an autonomous vehicle being ‘licensed’ to operate on our roads and perhaps an individual or organisation being ‘licensed’ to own a fleet of autonomous vehicles there may be stricter new requirements. The vehicles may need a real-time permit (a licence) for each journey. The vehicles may need to lodge a ‘flight plan’ approved by the local roads authority. On safety grounds the authority may also require the power to override and shutdown the autonomous vehicles at any time.

A relevant example of today of managing risk through control based on a ‘licence’ is your COVID vaccination status. Sadly vaccination status has far-reaching impacts beyond the individual — an unvaccinated person presents a higher risk to themselves, to family and to total strangers. So it is reasonable to limit the ‘freedoms’ to mix with other people for unvaccinated people. Which is exactly what most countries are doing. [What we can do with information technology is use technology to estimate personal risk to self and to others in different environments and interactions. This could enable a more nuanced and effective approach to prevent spreading and targeting responses. This discussion will be treated in another article!]

Let’s consider another example from the future. Flying cars become the norm. But tragic history reminds us how vehicles will sometimes be weaponised and deliberately driven into buildings or crowds. The risk is so real and high that it is likely that the vehicle should refuse to operate without a valid digital licence being provided. The smart city may have to develop other checks and balances to prevent even a fully licensed rogue individual from causing harm.

Tragically we know such scenarios are natural extensions of behaviours we have seen in other contexts. A ‘new wave’ smart city approach is to start thinking about them now, identify future-proof elements and co-create early draft designs with citizen stakeholders and users.

Summary

Digital transformation is beneficial but inadequate without a proper creative design process; a process that looks to the future then creates meaningful blueprints to guide the developments of today toward the outcomes we want for tomorrow.

In Australia we need a national design forum to work top-downward from the big-picture high-level general categories of licences, permits, qualifications down to the specifics of identity. We start with a stocktake of all the different types — focusing on ones with national and international significance. We need to look at these from a futures perspective and a lens of identifying future-proof elements, elements that require a national approach and elements that high-risk, high-impact if high jacked by rogue or malicious actors.

But more generally we need to empower the humble app designers and their bosses working in the backrooms of companies and government departments to prevent fragmentation. These people need access to mentors, communities of practice and forums where they can raise legitimate concerns, “My design requires data components (taxonomies) that have national significance and impact beyond my application — how do I prevent fragmentation and hook into the national design and futures blueprint?” and if these don’t yet exist, “How do I contribute to get them created?!”

Caveat

There are many innovative and forward looking thinkers in every organisation. This author doesn’t pretend that some of the above thinking and discussion is not occurring in government departments or in the back offices of key organisations. The fact that the Australian government and State governments are working on digital identities and indeed a variety of licences indicates a strong awareness of the potential. But history also shows that as a nation we struggle to design systems. Rather, each actor or department designs the fragment they control and hopes the rest will work out! It rarely does.

What are we going to do differently to break the cycle cost inefficiency designs of our data and technology-based systems?

A new wave approach is needed to break out of this cycle.