[Originally published on Australian Government DesignGov under a Creative Commons 3.0 BY AU licence]
Are you in the public sector and have interactions with business as part of your job? Would you like to share your experiences with us at DesignGov to help us understand the public sector side of business/government interactions?
Members of our team are currently in the process of interviewing a range of businesses, to understand their experience of interacting with government – their needs, their frustrations, and their thoughts about how to improve those interactions.
The insights from these contextual observations will be combined with the ideas on our ideas platform, our engagement with government agencies and peak industry associations, some additional research being undertaken (through another process that we hope to share more information about soon) and some other bits and pieces that we are doing (design is a messy process at times).
But we need to understand both sides of how businesses and public sector agencies interact. Any recommendations or suggestions we put forward to our Board and to the Secretaries Board have to consider how those recommendations might work in practice.
For this, we are hoping to interview a number of public servants about their experiences of interacting with business, their needs of/frustrations with the current processes, and their ideas about what might be able to be done on the public service side to make those interactions better and easier.
So if you are in the public sector and you interact with businesses as part of your role, we would love to hear from you if you would be willing to be interviewed for up to an hour at your work for the project.
What type of interactions?
We are interested in talking with those with experience in the whole spectrum of business/government interactions. This includes:
- Program/grant management
- Regulation/compliance
- Policy development and implementation, including consultation
- Information provision to businesses
- Collecting information from/managing reporting of information by businesses
- Procurement/consultants/service providers/industry partners
- Complaints/queries/negotiations
We think that most public servants will have had some experience with one or more of the above types of interaction with business as part of their role. We look forward to hearing from some of you!