Notes from a Digital Decade: A six-part series on a decade of digital transformation in Australian Local Government (2016 – 2026) pt.1

The phrase survived. The meaning didn't. If you pulled an ICT strategy off a council shelf from 2016 and sat it next to one written in 2026, the cover might have the same two words - "digital transformation" but I can guarantee they mean entirely different things now. A decade ago the term described a set of technology upgrades. Today it describes a way of running an organisation. That shift, quiet and steady rather than sudden, is the most important thing that has happened to local government ICT in ten years, and it is the thread running through this series.

Defining "Digital"

In 2016, "digital" mostly meant "new technology." For a lot of councils, the transformation agenda was a list of systems and channels. This often meant a refreshed website, online payment of rates and infringements, a mobile app for reporting potholes, or perhaps a brave migration of email or disaster recovery to the cloud. The work was real and vital, but it sat squarely inside the ICT team. It was framed as a series of discrete upgrades, and its success was measured by whether it went live, was it on time, did it save us some money. Digital was a thing the technology team did to the technology, on behalf of the rest of the organisation.

In 2026, "digital" mostly means "how the council works." The strategies I read now talk less about ICT and infrastructure and more about customer experience, service design, resilience, data as an asset, community outcomes and even ‘smart cities’. Transformation is no longer something done to the underlying technology; it is something done to the way services are delivered and people work, with technology as the enabler rather than the end game. It is co-owned by the customer experience staff, the service managers, the executive and elected members. They all have skin in it now, not just the ICT manager. But I think the single biggest conceptual change is that transformation has stopped being a project with a go-live date and has become a capability the organisation must keep building.

The impact on councils

When I started in this sector, the artefact of choice was a four or five-year ICT Strategic Plan: a many paged document, often produced by a consultant (like myself), setting out a roadmap with comforting milestones. The trouble was that the world it described was picking up speed and had usually moved on before the plan was fully adopted. A roadmap that named specific products and versions three years out was starting to become crystal ball thinking. Over the past decade I've watched councils quietly abandon that model. The horizon has shortened - rolling two-to-three-year roadmaps reviewed every 6 to 12 months are now far more common than fixed five-year plans. Newer strategies now read less like a fixed menu and more like a portfolio of actions: a clear sense of direction, a set of principles, a balance of quick wins and long bets, and an assumption that priorities will be re-cut as circumstances change. Funding uncertainty is also playing a part here. When you cannot be sure what next year's budget looks like, and adding 10% each year stops working, Council started to stop committing to a rigid five-year capital program and started working in shorter, adaptable increments.

The shift in how risk is addressed also played a part. A 2016 transformation conversation was, at heart, a delivery conversation. Will the project land, on time and on budget. But the risks that keep council leaders awake at night have broadened well beyond delivery. Can we sustain change once the project team disbands and the consultants leave? Can we keep ratepayers' data secure and our services running when, not if, something goes wrong? Can we keep pace with community expectations that now reset every time someone uses a slick app from a bank or a startup? The transformation agenda has evolved into change management, security, trust and capability in a way it simply was not a decade ago.

Reflections

None of this happened in one move. I’ve watched it happen through a series of inflection points, each of which nudged the collective understanding of "digital transformation" a little further from technology and a little closer to resembling organisational change. My intent for this article series is to walk through those inflection points that I think really moved the needle. The first tipping point was getting the server room out of the basement and into the cloud, which then fuelled the rise of shared services.

Without giving too much away before the end of the series, I think that ‘transformation’ was never the right word. It talked to me about a destination, or an end state, and that once reached you can stop. Smart councils have given up on the destination and are treating “digital” as a permanent capability to be invested in, governed and refreshed, the same way you would with any real asset.

Thanks for reading so far, and if you hold onto one question today about digital transformation, I hope it is “Digital transformation has moved a long way in ten years. Has your council's strategy, and the way you plan, fund and govern it, moved with it?”