Designing the Australian Digital Health Agency’s operating model

We partnered with the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) to redesign their operating model to boost efficiency, reduce duplication, improve organisational agility and uplift their Information Communications Technology (ICT) capability.

The Challenge

The ADHA delivers digital healthcare systems and the National Digital Health Strategy and Framework for Australia. To operate as effectively as possible, the ADHA sought to eliminate capability duplication, uplift its corporate capabilities, and facilitate new and streamlined ways of working within the organisation. The ADHA engaged Evolve&Amplify to ensure alignment between business areas to promote efficient and effective operations.

The Approach

We leveraged strategic documentation and engaged various business areas within ADHA to understand and model how the organisation delivers value to its stakeholders. We also identified the supporting business capabilities within the organisation which enable value delivery activities. Additionally, we utilised a combination of business motivation and operations models to produce a holistic and integrated view of ADHA’s business capability requirements. Through this analysis, we produced a view of the target state needed to achieve these requirements.

Our analysis identified information management as a critical capability underpinning AHDA value delivery. With this in mind, we assessed the end-to-end value chain for the areas in which information management was a required capability. We also assessed the maturity of each business area to manage information.

Throughout this process we worked closely with ADHA business users to engage them in the business architecture journey. Users validated value chain maps and helped to identify capability gaps and overlaps. The value chain assessment guided the development of a roadmap to support ADHA’s investment decisions. The roadmap informed a sourcing strategy to achieve the target operating model. The sourcing strategy was flexible enough for the market to educate the ADHA on the most effective ways to achieve outcomes and was scoped to ensure business’ objectives could be met.

The Outcome

We drew on our technical and business expertise to design a modular organisation that is agile, responsive and can adapt well to change. We focused on demonstrating the relationships between individual components and highlighting meaningful insights that could inform investment decisions. Using contemporary tools and frameworks, we designed a simple and clear target operating model. This ensured the model was easy to maintain, sufficient to guide investment and valuable over the long term.

The target operating model now supports ADHA’s business objectives, capabilities, and delivery approaches. With the model in place, its business needs are better considered in sourcing decisions and the organisation has benefited from increased responsiveness and agility, less duplication and reduced ICT complexity. The operating model has also demonstrated the need for a change program to strengthen its core capabilities.