About Anthony P Winning
I’m a researcher and service designer in Canberra. I study how people make judgements inside government systems, and how the impact of those judgements can be understood and measured.
I have worked on federal services at the Digital Transformation Agency, Services Australia, and the Department of Agriculture, including work on the Australian Taxation Office’s Relationship Authorisation Manager. The judgements I’ve studied vary in kind. Some are about authority: who is allowed to act on someone else’s behalf, and on what basis. Some are about inclusion: who is left behind when a service moves online, and who carries the cost. And some belong to the agency itself: how it would know whether a change actually worked. Most real decisions involve more than one of these at once.
What they share is that the trade-offs are rarely visible from inside the agency, because the impacts often fall on people outside it. Without that view, an agency cannot be sure it is framing the problem correctly. Nor can it tell whether an initiative is working, or see when its fixes create problems of their own.
I hold a PhD in Psychology from Macquarie University and a BSc in Computer Science from UNSW. The psychology shapes how I work: I care about rigorous measurement, about the gap between what people say and what they actually do, and about evidence that holds up when a senior executive pushes back on it. The computer science means I can design the systems that make that measurement possible, and build them where needed. Together, they let me define the problem and also map a practical path to solving it.
AI is changing how government decisions are made. Officers will increasingly decide with the help of systems that draw on far more data than any person could review, at a scale no manual process could match. The questions above don’t go away. They become harder to see and more costly to get wrong. The usual question is whether the model is accurate. The harder ones are whether the officer still owns the decision, and whether the decisions together leave people better off, as the policy intended. If nobody can show that, the agency has accountability on paper and not in practice.
If these are challenges your agency or organisation is facing, I’m currently available for contract and advisory work. Get in touch or connect with me to talk about a project or role.
Selected work
- Digital identity authorisation (DTA). Led mixed-methods research across two studies: 110 interviews and over 300 participants in quantitative research. Presented the findings to around 350 senior public servants at Parliament House. The program won Federal Government Project of the Year at the 2020 iTnews Benchmark Awards.
- Two frameworks adopted in that work. Capacity / Capability / Motivation explains why people need someone to act for them, and what each reason implies for risk and scope. Trust / Empower / Collaborate / Instruct was used by DTA senior management to frame inter-agency negotiations on digital identity, and to make the trade-off between risk management and end-user friction explicit in executive decision-making.
- Relationship Authorisation Manager (ATO system, engaged through the DTA). Three rounds of usability testing with 18 participants. Task success rose from 76% across the first two rounds to 98% in the third.
- myGov. Wrote the measurement proposal for myGov, linking delivery work to the program’s strategic outcomes.
- Digital inclusion (Services Australia). Produced the evidence base describing the digital divide as several distinct barriers (access, skills, motivation, and prior experience) rather than a single one.
Background
I have worked in industry for organisations including DXC, eBay Classifieds Group, and Woolworths. At Macquarie University I was valedictorian at my faculty’s graduation, selected by academic staff as the most outstanding student of my cohort, and I received a teaching prize for an outstanding contribution to student learning.
I’m based in Canberra and hold a reinstatable Baseline security clearance.