Digital solution supports vulnerable workers

This Australian state government is firmly focused on driving a strong and resilient economy that benefits all its citizens by creating more opportunities for people through jobs and skills; supporting businesses and industries to grow and prosper; and building vibrant communities and regions.

Business challenge

Responding to changes in the labour market, a department of the government consulted with community, industry, unions, and workers to design a pilot program to deliver support payments to eligible workers.

The solution needed to support the government’s mandate to digitize interaction with citizens with a simple and user-friendly workflow and process, with the capability to provide:

• A highly secure platform, since proof of identity and eligibility criteria are required
• Scalability to enable access for the more than 100,000 eligible workers anticipated
• Direct registration to make a claim by workers with minimal or no employer involvement
• Worker self-service with limited involvement and processing at the back-end by government employees

Solution

DXC Technology’s Practice for Salesforce initially worked with the state government department to successfully stand up a safe and secure, intelligent digital service that enables workers to register and claim for grants. 

Acting as a trusted advisor to the government during the planning, ideation and development of the pilot, DXC was subsequently engaged by the department to manage ongoing enhancements in the live environment.

With citizen engagement enabled through Salesforce service cloud, workers register directly via the government’s website or app to make their claims with minimal or no employer involvement. 

Salesforce service cloud provides both workflow and grant processing, whilst Oracle financials, implemented by DXC’s practice for Oracle, provides the functionality that administers funds and reconciles worker payments.

Salesforce is widely relied upon by the state government as the platform of choice for customer-related processing. 

The Salesforce platform centralizes citizen data to provide simpler processes for citizens to engage with government. It also allows implementation and customisation with a low code/no code approach, delivering fast time to value and improving an ongoing return on investment.

Naomi Wilson, Account Executive, DXC practice for Salesforce said, “The solution is built on Salesforce’s Public Sector solutions with out-of-the-box grant management functionality. Our philosophy is to avoid custom IP or coded assets wherever possible because it doesn’t usually offer good medium to long-term customer outcomes. Instead, we use as much as possible out of the box, so we adapted and applied minimal customisation to meet the government’s needs.”

Implementation

Design and discovery took place over one month, followed by development and go-live. Once handed over to the department, DXC began working on Stage 2 and 3 enhancements, focused on improving the worker experience, ensuring a frictionless sign-up process, security, fraud prevention, automation, and improved business rules. The backend data model is also being refined to improve service delivery focused on value for money.

Using an agile sprint approach has enabled the continual discovery of opportunities for improvement and solution evolution. A spokesperson for the government department, said, “DXC put forward a commercially flexible engagement model that allowed for agile delivery without the need for repeat procurements with each scope shift. The velocity of the team demonstrates excellent value for money. We established a model for delivering Salesforce enhancements with input from all the teams involved. This multi-way approach effectively achieves an iterative build, with experts from all sides questioning how we do things and rectifying issues or potential problems as we go.”

Working in a live environment, updates are deployed as they are completed. The government department also uses the MoSCoW prioritization technique to assess backlog, providing greater clarity on where to invest efforts next.

The spokesperson continued, “It’s about improving the program’s integrity, ensuring checks and balances are in place to identify fraud, validate identity and make certain the money goes to verified workers. We’ve also focused on supporting the program’s evaluation, collecting data and surveying workers after each application and claim.” 

Results and benefits

The project was an outcome-driven engagement with a highly visible, fast time-to-value and accessible outcome for the community.

While it’s still early days, the platform has the potential to support more than 100,000 eligible citizens that won’t need to go to work while sick.

The expected benefits to workers and businesses include reduced workplace injuries and illness, improved general productivity from healthier workers, and lower staff turnover rates.

Workers can apply for eligibility, make a claim, check their status, and provide bank details all in one place. This demonstrates the ability of DXC and Salesforce to deliver a robust, reliable, safe and user-friendly workflow with low workload overhead for government employees.

Recent enhancements have significantly improved the worker experience and simplified the backend grant approval process. In addition, insights into user behaviours are helping drive further enhancements and inform future solution direction. For example, the way people claim, the timing of their claims, and other behavioural impacts.

One of the fundamental design principles for this program was to offer a contemporary and efficient worker experience comparable to leading private sector services, like online banking, retail, and entertainment. 

The spokesperson concluded, “We built a multi-way squad that worked very well together. DXC demonstrated great flexibility with shifting requirements and a challenging governing structure, managing and delivering on requirements from both sides. The team did an amazing job with a truly agile mindset. We rolled up our sleeves and worked together to solve any problems.”