Deep Dive: Department of Health, Disability and Aging merger

Introduction

Following the significant administrative restructuring announced on 13 May 2025, which sees the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) merging into the Department of Health and Aged Care to form the new Department of Health, Disability and Aging, the sheer scale of such a transformation becomes evident. As an independent exercise, I've leveraged Orthogramic Insights to demonstrate how an advanced digital twin can bring unparalleled clarity, accuracy, and traceability to complex reorganisation efforts. This second page delves deeper into the specific artefacts created and quantifies the invaluable time savings that a tool like Orthogramic could deliver.

The strategic artefacts: A blueprint for integrated governance and operations

Our independent demonstration produced a suite of interconnected strategic documents, each serving a critical function in mapping out the proposed merger. These artefacts, generated with Orthogramic Insights, offer a comprehensive blueprint for the new Department of Health, Disability and Aged Care:

• Merger and acquisition - Reorganisation plan: This document outlines the strategic rationale, integration steps across current, transition, and target states. It details the phased journey, from initial analysis to a clearly defined target operating model, supported by robust integration initiatives and a performance monitoring framework. With Orthogramic, the intricate dependencies and sequencing of integration activities could be mapped and visualised, ensuring no critical step is overlooked. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HvderzqidhgiAhFtRMBgZrYctrQim3uR/view?usp=drive_link

• Organisation overview: This artefact represents the structured entity within which activities and value delivery occur, encompassing interconnected units, roles, and responsibilities. Orthogramic allows for the rapid construction of hierarchical structures, program mappings, and the identification of key organisational units, providing a clear picture of the combined entity. https://drive.google.com/file/d/147y3dGOPQ6kYs5EnwaBk4w_feouc0wK5/view?usp=drive_link

• Oversight report: This report analyses the governance structures, accountability relationships, performance oversight, policy governance, and strategic response mechanisms within the proposed new department. Orthogramic's ability to map these relationships ensures a robust framework for accountability and risk management from day one. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EIfjaGxoSywbr4kqi7vr4FOhTo0N2vBE/view?usp=drive_link

• Target operating model: This defines the desired future state of the integrated organisation, detailing how processes, people, technology, and information will align to deliver enhanced services. Orthogramic facilitates the design of new value streams and process models, ensuring optimal operational efficiency and participant outcomes. https://drive.google.com/file/d/11_2B3uRb3KPNUCm0fLukdmuhNgGrcBKX/view?usp=drive_link

• Strategic response model: This document outlines a comprehensive approach to addressing wide-ranging impacts across organisational structure, capabilities, stakeholders, policy, and performance in response to the machinery of government (MoG) change. Orthogramic's framework helps to identify potential risks and develop proactive strategies, ensuring resilience and adaptability. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e7oFYgS0MwDbyJjUSea-0E6n03i4syZz/view?usp=drive_link

Each of these artefacts, when generated through Orthogramic, is inherently linked, ensuring consistency and providing a single source of truth for the entire transformation.

Calculating the time saved with Orthogramic: A qualitative assessment

The Orthogramic Insights Digital Twin describes the core functionalities of Orthogramic: its ability to extract, structure, and visualise complex business architecture data. Based on these capabilities, and drawing parallels with typical large-scale government reorganisations, we can infer significant time savings if Orthogramic were deployed internally. https://insights.orthogramic.com/department_of_health_and_aged_care

Consider the traditional phases of a major merger or reorganisation:

1. Current state assessment and data collection:

   • Without Orthogramic: This involves manually sifting through thousands of pages of documents (annual reports, corporate plans, policy documents, operational manuals), conducting numerous interviews, and painstakingly compiling data into spreadsheets and presentations. This phase alone can take 3-6 months for a large government entity, requiring a dedicated team of analysts.

   • With Orthogramic: The tool's automated data ingestion and structuring capabilities could process these documents in a fraction of the time. Key information, relationships, and dependencies are automatically extracted and mapped into the digital twin. This could reduce the data collection and initial assessment phase to weeks rather than months, potentially saving 2-4 months of effort.

2. Blueprint design and modelling (Target Operating Model, Reorganisation Plan)

   • Without Orthogramic: Designing the future state involves extensive workshops, iterative drafting of models, and manual validation against strategic objectives. Changes in one area require manual updates across multiple documents, leading to version control issues and delays. This phase often takes 2-4 months.

   • With Orthogramic: The interactive digital twin allows for rapid prototyping and modelling of different scenarios. Changes made in one part of the model automatically propagate, ensuring consistency. The traceability feature means that design decisions are instantly linked back to strategic drivers. This could condense the design phase to 1-2 months, saving 1-3 months.

3. Stakeholder alignment and communication

   • Without Orthogramic: Presenting complex plans to diverse stakeholders (e.g., executive committees, staff, external partners) often requires creating numerous bespoke presentations and answering repetitive questions due to lack of a single, accessible source of truth. This can be a continuous, time-consuming effort throughout the project.

   • With Orthogramic: The interactive nature of the digital twin provides a single, dynamic platform for communication. Stakeholders can explore the model themselves, reducing the need for extensive, repeated explanations. This enhances understanding and accelerates buy-in, potentially saving weeks of communication overhead across the project lifecycle.

4. Performance monitoring and oversight framework development

   • Without Orthogramic: Manually mapping performance indicators to strategic objectives and organisational units is a complex task, prone to inconsistencies. Establishing clear oversight mechanisms requires significant documentation and approval cycles. This can take 1-2 months.

   • With Orthogramic: The metamodel inherently links performance measures to capabilities, value streams, and strategic outcomes, automating much of this mapping. The oversight framework can be built directly into the digital twin, ensuring real-time visibility and traceability. This could reduce the effort to weeks, saving 0.5-1 month.

Overall time savings

Conservatively, across these core planning and design phases, the use of Orthogramic could lead to an estimated 3.5 to 8 months of time saved in the initial planning and blueprinting stages of a transformation of this magnitude. This acceleration is critical for government reforms, allowing the benefits of integration to be realised far sooner and enabling faster delivery of improved services to the Australian community.

Conclusion: Empowering modern government with intelligent tools

This independent demonstration, utilising publicly available information and the capabilities of Orthogramic Insights, underscores the profound impact that digital twin technology can have on large-scale organisational transformations. By providing unparalleled clarity, accuracy, and traceability, and by significantly accelerating critical planning phases, tools like Orthogramic are not just efficiency enhancers; they are fundamental enablers for modern governments to navigate complexity, mitigate risk, and deliver on their strategic imperatives with greater speed and confidence.