Establishing the Digital Transformation Agency’s investment management office

We partnered with the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) to establish a new business function – the Digital Investment Management Office (DIMO). The DIMO provides oversight of all significant government ICT and technology investment projects. 

The Challenge

The DTA is on a mission to make Australian Government services simpler, clearer and faster by providing strategic policy leadership, investment advice and oversight to drive digital transformation. The DTA were tasked with setting up the DIMO to perform a centralised governance function to oversee high-profile digital investments across the Commonwealth Government.

As a completely new business area, the DIMO faced several key challenges, these include having no centralised governance in place, an unclear operating model and undefined required capabilities. Overcoming these difficulties was essential for DIMO’s initial and ongoing success. The DTA engaged Evolve&Amplify to design DIMO’s operating model and to define and assemble the required business capabilities.

The Approach

We applied contemporary human-centred design and business architecture methods to define the problem and understand the outcomes that DIMO needed to achieve. A design plan for the new governance function was created to help achieve the target-state operating model. Industry best practices were used to define inputs, strategic objectives, and the core business activities. We then illustrated how these motivations influenced the core business activities by constructing a value chain.

The business capabilities required for each core activity were defined through collaboration with DIMO team members. This resulted in a work plan detailing capabilities to be developed and acquired. DIMO users were engaged to validate the capability models, and an investment roadmap was built.

The externally facing governance function was designed to provide services to other government agencies. This involved us defining business requirements for a target-state work management system and delivering it using customer relationship management and service management capabilities. The service delivery side of the new governance function was established by developing product and services catalogues.

The Outcomes 

Evolve&Amplify provided invaluable assistance to the DTA in delivering this important transformational project, by applying proven business architecture and service design methods. DIMO is fully operational and supported in its success by the right capabilities, services, and operating model. It was established on time, on budget and to both DIMO's and DTA’s satisfaction, now providing oversight of major ICT projects within government agencies. After this successful engagement, DIMO engaged us to develop a data management strategy and build a data management solution. We also leveraged our expertise to define the business requirements for future systems, continuing our investment in DIMO’s success.