The New South Wales government has put one of its most senior service delivery reform roles up for grabs after it officially called for candidates to head the Office of Finance and Services (OFS) over the weekend.

Described as a “highly visible leadership role” that reports to the Minister of Finance and Services and Secretary of the NSW Treasury, the opening for a chief executive at OFS comes as the state government continues to push hard on the innovation front to make citizen interactions with government simple and user friendly.

According to the job description, the role carries accountability for operating expenditure of $1.5 billion “and staffing of around 6500 people”.

The pace of change and emanating from OFS has been unrelenting over the past few years since the successive O’Farrell and Baird governments set about making the majority of customer facing services and transactions available online and on mobile devices to spare citizens the burden of queuing up at offices.

A big part of that work has been dramatically slimming down the number of disparate websites sites and touch points so that people can undertake multiple transactions in a single session rather than being forced to surf across dozens of individual agencies.

That same approach has been extended to retail shopfronts with so-called one-stop-shops offering multiple services increasingly replacing individual offices for everything from renewing driver’s licences to paying rent on public housing.

Among the deliverables for the role are “significant reforms” that include “business and organisational redesign” without diminishing the quality of service delivery.

Also in the frame is continuing the government’s top-down overhaul of procurement that has included everything from a cloud-first ICT mandate to pushing departments to use car sharing service Go-Get instead of buying fleet vehicles.

NSW Finance Minister Dominic Perrottet, to whom the CEO’s role answers, told Government News last month that he was keen to see pricing and catalogues for approved state government suppliers extended across federal and local jurisdictions, a move that would both enhance the contestability of services while broadening the number of potential government customers to suppliers.

Applications for the position close on 17th November with executive head hunter firm Watermark Search International handling recruitment.

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