As pressure mounts on both large and small government agencies to deliver a digital customer experience that reflects what people are used to in the private sector, public sector leaders often face the important question of how to instigate cultural change in service design without floundering in the enormity of the task.

Like many companies, a learning curve for government organisations is appreciating that good design processes aren’t necessarily natural and need to be cultivated and developed.

An important step, says Accenture Interactive managing director Michael Buckley, is to understand that change can be readily visualised through prototyping smaller manageable components that demonstrate clear and repeatable benefits.

“Pick off one problem at a time,” he says, adding that key resources to inform good are already often there.

This includes harnessing existing data pools that typically reside within established systems also gives agencies and their leaders the ability to stay in control of change processes in-house — all the way from design right through to delivery.

“Data is at the core of the technology,” Buckley says.

As to whether or not the design thinking and prototyping journey is worth the price of a ticket, Buckley says there’s typically a ten-fold increase in value for each dollar spent on design thinking.