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Vision

Within the Digital and ICT planning framework, this guideline describes how to collaborate with stakeholders, customers and service partners to confirm and establish the service vision for an organisation.

The techniques in this guideline with help practitioners advocate for the implementation of new opportunities identified during horizon scanning and identify technology trends, placing them in the context of how services could be conducted.

The activities in this guideline provide practitioners with an agreed understanding of the strategic direction of the business and how that direction translates into a vision for how services are delivered.

This guideline provides an overview of several techniques and concepts such as design thinking and journey maps to support visioning activities. Several organisations facilitate training for these techniques and should be explored before deciding on approaches and resources for a visioning workshop.

Audience

A practitioner in the context of this guideline can include one or more of the following roles:

  • Digital or ICT strategic planners
  • Agency and service strategic planners
  • Workforce planners
  • Business analysts
  • Information managers.

The activities in this guideline may best be lead by agency and service strategic planners.

We recommend working with other key stakeholders including business representatives, customers, service partners and employees, to define a compelling vision that will inspire or motivate a desire for change within the organisation.

Understanding stakeholder expectations

It’s important to use several methods to confirm how stakeholders perceive the organisation. These should capture stakeholder knowledge and expectations about:

  • whether current services are truly customer-centric
  • what opportunities exist
  • the expectations and desires of customers, staff and service partners
  • if an organisation’s digital experiences can be articulated to meet or exceed those expectations.

Digital or ICT planning practitioners need to understand the relevance of digital or ICT technologies in transforming services to ensure they can contribute to the discussions at the visioning workshops

To develop a strategy that is co-designed and co-created, practitioners should be willing to:

  • provide contextual awareness
  • become more experimental and listen to different points of view
  • be willing to interpret situations in innovative ways
  • freely offer newfound insight and experience.

Engaging stakeholders in the visioning process

Buy-in is achieved when new ideas and new ways of doing things are co-created and designed with others to create stronger innovative or novel ideas. We recommend selecting techniques that place people at the centre of the change and help stakeholders understand both the current state and target provision of services from different perspectives (e.g., customers, employees and service partners).

All the methods described in this guideline help to facilitate the art of the storytelling and put customers and other stakeholders at the centre of the story rather than focusing on digital capability or technology.

It’s helpful to represent opportunities or convey complex situations, problems or solutions pictorially and engage stakeholders to work in groups, using methods that include drawing or graphics. These techniques often work best when everyone gets the opportunity to draw to convey their ideas. Encourage participants not to worry about their drawing skill, but rather focus on being open and creative.

The service vision draws on information from the Digital and ICT framework guidelines that relate to the strategic business direction of the organisation and well as information gathered from horizon scanning and identifying technology trends.

Framework planning principles

There are two principles that underpin the digital or ICT planning framework that can be applied when using this guideline to establish a service vision. They are co-design and creativity.

  • Co-design means practitioners should conduct activities in collaboration with the stakeholders identified in the Sponsorship, scope and stakeholders guideline.
  • Creativity should be applied by practitioners to investigate new and creative ways of using tools and approaches to enrich the overall planning experience with stakeholders.

Practitioners aren’t expected to be experts in applying the techniques in this guideline, but instead gain an appreciation for how a collective understanding of service-related drivers, problems, opportunities, stakeholders as well as what is important to them, can be quickly identified and understood.

The activities in this guideline are also iterative. It may take several workshops with the same or different stakeholders to arrive at a service vision. It may also require broader consultation and socialising with customers and the business stakeholders before the service vision can be endorsed.

Gathering information

The information gathered using the activities in this guideline may already exist and can be documented or generated from other planning related activities. Practitioners should investigate possible sources of information that could be relevant to establishing the service vision. These documents include but are not limited to:

  • strategic planning documents
  • information gathered during horizon scanning
  • information gathered as part of investigating technology trends
  • business related value chains or even business process maps that may exist within the agency
  • existing service blueprints or journey mapping information that may already exist in the organisation
  • industry patterns or generic examples that may be openly available for the specific policy domains (e.g., health, education, transport, horizon etc).

Refer to the following guidelines for further information:

The first step to building the motivation for change is to understand the strategic drivers. Understanding the strategic drivers of the organisation is also an important part of visioning workshops with stakeholders.

There are several models that can help practitioners to identify and classify strategic drivers. These models include, but are not limited to:

  • Porter’s Five Forces Model
  • the PESTEL Framework
  • Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) assessment.

Porter’s five forces model

The five forces model is a framework for understanding the competitive forces at work in an industry or policy domain and how they influence the value to stakeholders as well as how those stakeholders may present an opportunity or threat. These forces are represented in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1

A diagram is showing four boxes surrounding a circle. Each box has arrows pointing inwardly towards the circle. The circle is titled Competitive rivalry. The competitive rivalry is directly influenced by 4 forces: *Bargaining power of suppliers *Threat of substitutes *Bargaining power of buyers *Threat of substitute of products and services

A link is provided in the Resources section of this guideline to the Harvard School of Business where Porter’s Five Forces model is explained in more detail.

PESTEL framework

PESTEL is a strategic planning tool to help practitioners and other stakeholders understand the external influences on the organisation or its services. PESTEL is a recommended framework, as the types of drivers considered are typically more relevant to a public-sector environment.

The PESTLE framework elements are:

  • Political—government bureaucracy, political advocacy and lobby groups, labour movements.
  • Economic—exchange rates, business cycles, local, national and global growth rates.
  • Social—demographic impacts, social movements and trends.
  • Technological—mobile and connecting technologies, new products and materials.
  • Environmental—climate concerns and impacts, pollution, recycling.
  • Legal—laws, regulations, taxes, borders, jurisdictions.

See the Resources section of this guideline for a comprehensive booklet about PESTEL analysis is provided in the Resources section of this guideline.

SWOT analysis

SWOT analysis is the most commonly used framework for understanding the influences on an organisation. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

SWOT analysis helps identify potential strategies by considering how to:

  • build on strengths
  • address identified weaknesses
  • capitalise or invest in the opportunities
  • mitigate the impact of threats.

SWOT analysis examines both internal and external influences. Generally, strengths and weaknesses tend to be internally focused, and opportunities and threats are initiated from outside the organisation.

The advantage of using a SWOT based approach is it not only looks at the threats and weaknesses but also the opportunities and current strengths. This information can be useful in visioning activities as stakeholders may begin to identify their expectations and potential opportunities. It also provides the opportunity for stakeholders to identify what is currently working well within the current environment.

See the Resources section of this guideline for an animation explaining SWOT analysis in detail.

Most strategic documents will contain a vision statement. The vision statement may already be defined in the strategic plan. In some circumstances the vision statement may represent a corporate or executive level view of the agency rather than a statement about the service delivery aspirations of the agency.

In these circumstances, it can be necessary to define a digital or ICT vision statement that reflects both the service and technology aspirations of the agency.  Developing a vision statement will help anchor future work in relation to the strategy including understanding customer expectations, defining objectives and defining business outcomes.

A good vision statement should be:

  • short, no longer than two sentences at a maximum
  • future focused and written as a future state
  • specific to the business, describing the unique outcome the digital transformation will achieve in relation to the services and customers of the agency
  • compellingly written to describe a future that engages the heart as well as the head
  • simple and easily understood by people both inside and outside the organisation
  • ambitious enough to be exciting but not unachievable
  • aligned to the value of the customer and employees who deliver services.

When developing a vision statement consider using the following process steps:

  1. Define the primary output.
  2. Define the unique twist or provocative proposition that will potentially inspire change.
  3. Apply a level of quantification to the proposition statement. It does not have be to a percentage or dollar figure, but it might refer to a segment of the population that will be primarily affected by the change (e.g., all Queenslanders in need of healthcare, all children in both primary and secondary public school, or people in rural and remote communities).
  4. Add relatable human ‘real world’ aspects (e.g., will customers no longer be disadvantaged by distance or need to stand in line and can access services in one place).

Brainstorming is a group creativity technique where participants work together to find a creative solution for a specific problem by gathering a list of spontaneous ideas.

Brainstorming is about creating an open environment that encourages everyone to participate. All participants are encouraged to contribute, helping them develop a rich list of ideas and expectations. Some of these ideas can be crafted into original, creative solutions to a problem, while others can spark even more ideas.

During brainstorming sessions, people should avoid criticising or rewarding ideas. Practitioners should try to open up possibilities and break down incorrect assumptions about the problem's limits. Unconventional ideas should be welcomed and built upon with the group.

Best practices for brainstorming

People have different thinking styles and may be reluctant to think out loud in a group. It can be very helpful to allow participants some individual time to think and record their thoughts on cards or post it notes before putting forward ideas and discussing as a group.

As the group facilitator, practitioners should spend time and energy supporting and motivating groups and guiding the discussion. Stick to one conversation at a time, and refocus the group if people become side tracked.

The following practices can help ensure you conduct a productive brainstorming session:

  • Clearly define the problem that needs to be solved. When conducted as part of a greater workshop, it may be necessary for a group to define the problem they are going to solve based on the work they did as part of defining the strategic drivers or vision statement.
  • Information gathered as part of SWOT or PESTEL analysis and issues identified in horizon scanning can be used to frame the problem or problems and spark ideas.
  • Try to include people from a wide range of disciplines as well as customer experiences. Like-minded people are unlikely to generate as many creative ideas as a group with diverse backgrounds.
  • Appoint one person to record the ideas that come from the session and present back to the workshop. When using post-it notes or cards, this person may take on the role of grouping or theming similar or related ideas.
  • Initiate a group discussion that enables participants to build on existing ideas and generate more innovative ones.
  • Include a report back session where groups get the opportunity to present ideas to other groups participating in the workshop.

Rich pictures are so called because they capture the richness of the problem or situation. The aim of this method is to capture the complexity of the problem or situation so practitioners can easily identify interrelationships and connections.

Rich pictures focus on using images to convey thoughts and meaning. Words are generally only used as part of the overall imagery, or where participants fail to accurately convey the meaning and ideas in imagery.

Rich pictures build the level of collective understanding between stakeholders. There is no particular style or structure to the picture. Artistic skills do not matter. Rich pictures can be used to understand the complexities of the current situation as well as provide a mechanism for portraying the target service delivery vision.

Getting started

Innovative ways to move forward as well as themes, issues, linkages, culture, climate and even value judgements can be captured in a rich picture. A rich picture should attempt to assemble everything that might be relevant to a problem or situation.

If you’re unsure where to begin, follow these steps in order.

  1. Look for the elements of structure or stakeholders in the situation.
  2. Identify elements of process within the situation.
  3. Incorporate the ways in which the structure and the processes interact.
  4. Include social roles or attitudes of those involved within the situation and the kinds of behaviour of stakeholders in a situation.

As a practice example, the next time you’re in an internal meeting, don’t take notes, draw your own individual rich picture of what the people are saying and what the issues are.

See the Resources section of this guideline for rich picture samples and YouTube video tutorials.

Journey mapping is a way to uncover and understand how customers are experiencing your services and build empathy around the customer’s individual needs and experiences. Like rich pictures, journey mapping uses both graphic methods as well as words to help build a narrative.

A journey map captures the customer experience from their point of view and can tell a rich story about what happens to a customer that’s hard to capture without turning it into a narrative. Narratives and story-telling are a powerful tool to achieve collective thinking around human-centred design.

Mapping the end-to-end customer journey

Journey mapping can also be used to imagine a future state, using the format as a tool to speculate on what a customer might see and do if services were transformed. It may be possible in a co-design environment to conduct journey mapping on both a current state as well as a target state experience.

In creating a journey map, use customer narratives and customer data to plot:

  • the customer experience over time
  • a map of what they are doing, thinking, and feeling during the journey
  • what (e.g., applications, digital services) and who they interact with along the way.

Gather information about customer experience

The first step is to understand the service scenario through interviews and data gathering to identify the points in the journey that represent a significant positive or negative experience for the customer. These represent points of pain or gain.

Journey maps are best created by interviewing multiple customers to capture their insights, and mapping them against each other to find commonalities, patterns, and trends. It may be an iterative process, or practitioners may map several journeys in a single workshop working in groups. Data on customers experience collected previously by the agency may be used but this information should be validated.

You can also consider using data sources such as customer survey results, user experience testing and website or business service application analytics as additional evidence to support and validate points on your journey map.

Next time you are in a small, internal meeting, don’t take notes, instead draw your own journey map based on identified customer feedback, user data or pain points.

If you have a good understanding of your customer experience or have identified a particular pain point for the customer or the agency, developing a service blueprint should be your next step.

If the customer experience and perceptions are already known and mapped, it can be more practical to develop a service blueprint to help inform vision activities.

Service blueprinting demonstrates not only what happens along a customer journey, but also how the agency works to produce the services and customer experience. The blueprinting process requires the collaboration of cross-functional groups in the organisation to document events that happen not only in the interaction with customers, but also the interactions that happen behind the scenes to deliver the service.

Blueprints use an iterative process. The first step is to consider your findings (e.g., customer journey maps), then refine the blueprint over time with additional information or through consultation.

The type of information captured in service blueprints typically includes:

  • Physical evidence—all of the tangible things that the customer experiences during a journey (e.g. application form, invoice, license).
  • Customer actions—the steps, choices, interactions or activities the customer experiences while purchasing or evaluating a service.
  • On-stage contact—staff interactions that are visible to the customer.
  • Back-stage contact—staff interactions or steps that are invisible to the customer.
  • Support Processes—systems that support the actions of the customers and staff.
  • Moments of truth—each time the line of interaction is crossed via a link from the customer to a staff member, or agency in the case of self-service technologies.
  • External Pain Points—gaps that lead the customer to think the service may be of poorer quality.
  • Internal Pain Points—gaps the customer may not see but makes it harder to deliver the service.

During service blueprinting, practices involved should:

  • identify the service to be blueprinted, for planning purposes it may be necessary to adopt a more generalised view of the services
  • identify the customer or customer segments
  • map the journey from the customer’s perspective
  • map the on-stage and back-stage interactions
  • link the customers, contact people and activities to the support systems required
  • add the evidence of service delivery at reach point along the customer journey
  • Identify the moments of truth and the internal and external pain points.

See the Resources section of this guideline for samples of service blueprints and YouTube videos that describe service blueprints.

It is important to consider what workforce will be needed to deliver the agency’s future vision. The first step in forecasting future workforce needs is to understand the future work requirements of the organisation.

Techniques such as service journey mapping and service blueprinting may have identified the type of work that needs to be undertaken to support the agency’s vision. This can include working remotely or increased work mobility because of evolving technology, different models of customer engagement, increased use of technology and information or working more closely with service partners or other organisations for example.

Forecasting the future workforce needs is required so specific objectives and strategies required to address skills gaps can be identified. Practitioners should familiarise themselves with the techniques in this guideline and determine the most appropriate approach to incorporate workforce planning activities into broader digital and ICT planning activities.

It can be practical to include techniques such as focus groups, force field analysis or scenario planning as part of digital and ICT vision activities with stakeholders. Other techniques may require dedicated workshops or additional engagement with stakeholders to determine a future state.

Questions to consider when identifying future competencies and roles include:

  • What new skills are needed for future business and work requirements?
  • What are the critical core organisational competencies required to support the organisation’s future vision and culture?
  • What new knowledge, skills and abilities do specific positions, job groups or work areas need to perform in the future?
  • What are the key differences in the current and future workforce competencies?

Also see the Workforce profile guideline for more information on how to assess labour supply.

Rich pictures, customer journey maps, service blueprints, brainstorming and workforce considerations all help practitioners and other stakeholders to visualise what the end state of services could look like and the impact on the users of services and the workforce.

The methods outlined in this guideline are also iterative. It might take several workshops with diverse groups of people to articulate what future services might look like. Practitioners could consider running brief roadshows or ‘drop-in’ events to allow larger groups of stakeholders and other interested parties to provide input into the service vision.

Creating a narrative

These rich sources of information help build a narrative for the digital or ICT strategy or plan. It is likely more than one visualisation of service delivery will be required to help build the narrative.

You don’t need to complete visualisations of every service offered by the agency internally and externally. Focus on the core services and raise the level at which the service is described to convey a general idea of what the experience for customers, employees and service partners might be.

This narrative may include details related to:

  • contemporary ways of marketing services or conducting campaigns
  • contemporary ways for people access services and products (e.g. online)
  • innovative ways for people to work and connect (e.g. social media, telecommuting and virtual meetings or consultations)
  • contemporary ways for people to access, provide, use or receive information
  • new technology capability to store, secure and share information
  • new partnerships involved in the delivery of services.
  • changes to the skills and capabilities of the agency’s workforce, including new digital roles and the digital worker.

Follow up activities

It is important to ‘play back’ the outputs of workshops to participants within a short timeframe from the workshop. This will maintain interest and ensure the participants feel like their time to participate was worthwhile.

It may be necessary to refine the workshop outputs into your final presentation to help of share your findings and consult with stakeholders on the proposed vision. We recommend working with marketing and communications specialists in your agency to help make your presentation more vibrant and engaging.

Last updated:
7 December 2022
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