Family playing ball on the beach in winter

The Alliance measure quality of life and how this is affected by a range of factors. Photo from Monkey Business Images.

Human Services Delivery Research Alliance

CSIRO and the Department of Human Services (DHS) have formed a research alliance to harness the power of science and improve service delivery to more than six million Australians each year.

  • 27 June 2011 | Updated 22 February 2013

Service delivery reform

The Human Services portfolio has begun a transformation that will dramatically improve its flexibility and effectiveness to deliver services to the Australian community.

Every day, millions of Australians interact with agencies across the Human Services portfolio, including Centrelink, Medicare Australia and the Child Support Agency. The portfolio delivers more than A$100 billion in payments and more than 200 different services.

Human services must keep up with the changing demographics and needs of the Australian community. Australians expect a service that is focused on them, and targeted to their needs and circumstances. This involves access to efficient, high-quality services in an easy and coordinated way.

About The Alliance

The A$16 million five-year Human Services Delivery Research Alliance (HSDRA) is addressing the research challenges and questions arising from, and in support of, the Service Delivery reform agenda.

The Research Alliance is working in support of a national service delivery system that is evidence-based, sustainable, people-centric and harmonised across government and public human service delivery dimensions.

It is using innovative technologies and practices to increase the efficiency of government services, create options for future service delivery and improve the capacity for government to build better relationships with its customers.

HSDRA is leveraging DHS' depth of experience in human services delivery with CSIRO’s strengths in services research to deliver a more efficient and effective national service delivery system.

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The Human Services Research Delivery Alliance
Staff from CSIRO and Human Services describe the main benefits of working together in the Human Services Delivery Research Alliance (HSDRA). This video was co-produced by CSIRO and the Australian Government Department of Human Services.

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Transcript

Gina Beschorner, Senior Social Media Advisor, Department of Human Services

Its groundbreaking research partnering scientists with government I think opens up new opportunities and new insights.

Cécile Paris, Science Leader, Human Information Interaction, CSIRO

It's very exciting to see that we are actually having an impact on people because of the technology.

Paul Cowan, GM Strategic Information Division, Department of Human Services

It's heralding a new way of working for the department.

Voiceover

Harnessing the power of science to improve service delivery to millions of Australians. That’s the aim of a A$16m five year research alliance between the Department of Human Services and CSIRO.

Paul Cowan, GM Strategic Information Division, Department of Human Services

What's exciting about it is a licence to explore rather than just our traditional role of delivering pre-determined policies and programs.

Michael Kearney, Director HSDRA CSIRO

When you're doing something complicated like human services there are lots of opinions about what will work and what won't work what’s better and what’s worse, what CSIRO brings as a science organisation to the alliance is a collection of what we call robust evidence. So rather than having an opinion we go out and we make some measurements, we do an analysis and we say from the information we’ve collected we think this approach will be better than that approach.

Paul Cowan, GM Strategic Information Division, Department of Human Services

We are actively through this alliance looking at gaining insights from the community, from citizens in the community, about how they want to deal with us and what they would like to do when they do deal with us.

Voiceover

The alliance is already producing results. Vizie is a tool to monitor what customers are saying about the department in social media.

Cécile Paris, Science Leader, Human Information Interaction, CSIRO

It essentially adds some smarts to the process trying to understand what are people talking about, grouping them into clusters, organising them into the appropriate discussions, so everything gets grouped together, to then make it easier for somebody to look at what is happening out there on social media.

Amanda Dennett, Senior Social Media Advisor, Department of Human Services

We find issues that we never aware of before, we're more efficient as a result because the tool that we built together allows us to respond more quickly and archive those responses.

Voiceover

The pilot for Vizie has proved so successful; it has been adopted by other agencies. And for the department’s customers it means they get the right information when they need it.

Amanda Dennett, Senior Social Media Advisor, Department of Human Services

People have said that they're really surprised that the government would respond to their question, that they felt reassured that they’re received official government information in online forums where often it’s just people’s opinions or experiences that are being shared and we've also received votes for best answer on Yahoo answers and there's a bit of a competition in our team to get best answer and what we try to do is just take complex information and respond to people in a meaningful way so that they don't assess themselves out of support that they could be entitled to.

Voiceover

The alliance is also helping customers through a special online community - Next Step - for parents required to move from one Centrelink payment to another.

Gina Beschorner, Senior Social Media Advisor, Department of Human Services

The community is a tailored space that has been made just for them. So we did focus group testing before we created the community with parents and we asked them what they would need from us and a lot of parents said that they don't get enough informational from government when they do this transition.

Cécile Paris, Science Leader, Human Information Interaction, CSIRO

We're looking at how do on line communities work how do people get involved in it how can we design mechanisms to encourage people to interact in it to share their experiences, to support each other, be active in the community so that the community has more of a life.

Gina Beschorner, Senior Social Media Advisor, Department of Human Services

The benefit to the department is that we’re helping customers get better outcomes for themselves. So that by putting that extra bit of effort in early, to give them the information they need, they can then make the right decision for themselves, I think that makes them less reliant on our department in the long term.

Voiceover

CSIRO is also measuring how trusting these customers are - unique research with far reaching implications.

Cécile Paris, Science Leader, Human Information Interaction, CSIRO

The hypothesis is that the more trust people put in that community among each other and to the community provider, the more benefit they will get out of it because the more they will share the more they will interact. So we are essentially in the science looking at mechanism to raise that social trust and ways to start measuring it. That is also quite important because it might also increase the trust that the citizen might have with respect to government, government services and how government is trying to support them.

Voiceover

There are about 25 CSIRO scientists working on projects as diverse as identifying the pathways people take through different social security services and methods to detect patterns in social worker demand.

Other alliance projects are providing an evidence-based understanding of investment decisions and business processes.

Paul Cowan, GM Strategic Information Division, Department of Human Services

The alliance provides us a great opportunity to gain access to some really first-rate thinking that’s going on in CSIRO.

Amanda Dennett, Senior Social Media Advisor, Department of Human Services

It has given the department a five year period in which to really focus on research to support our customers and to find efficiencies in the way that we do things.

Gina Beschorner, Senior Social Media Advisor, Department of Human Services

We are measuring things that have never been done before in government.

Michael Kearney, Director HSDRA CSIRO

The alliance has the potential to have very big effects on the way human services are delivered in Australia.

Hide Transcript

Mutual benefits

The HSDRA alliance will provide benefits to both organisations.

DHS' world-class capabilities will help identify the current and future challenges for human services delivery including:

  • Australia’s changing demographic
  • efficiency of government services
  • improved service delivery to remote and indigenous Australians
  • future input to policy reform and sound information to advise its directions and decisions
  • growing its impact in the social inclusion domain.

For CSIRO, the alliance offers research opportunities that will enable us to use complex systems modelling to address the need for integrated service delivery that is connected and focused on citizens.

Science for Services

The HSDRA combines DHS' depth of experience in human services delivery with CSIRO's strengths in services research to deliver a more efficient and effective national service delivery system.

An evidence-based approach will give DHS more confidence to develop and adapt programs most suited to a changing Australia. CSIRO’s expertise in understanding complex systems has been effectively applied to services.

Science has the tools and methods to model the array of services and programs offered by DHS and the way people interact with them at different points and from different places throughout their lives.

Scientific analysis will help identify when DHS' services are important, predicting which services would work the best for which groups of people, testing scenarios on how to deliver them and plan interventions that enable individuals to help themselves into the future.

The Alliance will focus on a number of research areas in support of service delivery reform including:

  • creating a model that estimates the requirements for DHS services on a geographical basis, and then relating that to existing and anticipated service provision
  • measuring quality of life and how this is affected by a range of factors such as education, workforce participation, accommodation and social interaction
  • working with DHS to determine potential strategies for intensive support and measuring their impact
  • modifying existing business rules using evidence based methods to provide better outcomes for customers and greater efficiency
  • using novel methods to monitor social media enabling DHS to measure the effectiveness of communications and better understand their customers
  • streamlining communications, creating a more personalised web experience and tailoring information delivery to suit the needs of individual customers
  • increasing back office efficiency by studying individual work processes and how they interact.

Find out more about some of the HSDRA projects:

Online communities: improving communication with customers

CSIRO is working with Centrelink to develop and trial an online forum with a target group of Centrelink customers.

Vizie provides social media monitoring to identify customer needs

Our social media monitoring tool Vizie is transforming the way government agencies listen to, understand and respond to customer feedback from social media.

Improving social welfare services with powerful data analysis

CSIRO is developing sophisticated technologies to help the Department of Human Services (DHS) understand and respond to unexpected trends in demand for social worker services.

Understanding the full impact of social service delivery

CSIRO and the Department of Human Services (DHS) are working together to gain a more complete understanding of the hard-to-measure impacts of human services.

Pathways: a new approach to social service systems

Mapping and analysing pathways through social welfare systems could show which programs work best.

Emergency Response Intelligence Capability (ERIC)

The Emergency Response Intelligence Capability (ERIC) is a web based productivity tool that gathers data, presents it in a map based web site and helps generate situation reports for emergency events at specific locations.