5 technologies helping to maximise infrastructure investment in 2021

Emerging digital tools are helping government to develop, operate, maintain, upgrade and dispose of assets, ensuring citizens have access to world class infrastructure. Read on to hear about how governments across Australia are already leveraging smart technologies in asset and infrastructure management to deliver better infrastructure. Over the next year, integrating these technologies into asset management across state and federal government will make-or-break Australia’s record infrastructure investment. Vicmap is a portfolio of spatial data and products, including high-resolution spatial imagery and LiDAR data with coverage across the State. Vicmap equips a wide range of State Government organisations and partners with …

Driving Efficiency Through Hyperautomation

For an organisation like Revenue NSW, this is a particularly important thing to be focussed on, particularly since they are the state’s main revenue management agency, “responsible for $27 billion of the state’s revenue in 2019/20, or about a third of all NSW finances.” They operate in five locations across the state and regularly look for ways of automating processes whilst also ensuring consistency across their five offices. Using robotics is one way of doing that, but in essence, robotics is part of “a broader suite of hyper-automation that also includes system to system integration across the organisation,” all of …

Why customer experience in Local Government starts with a focus on employee experience

Local councils are largely customer-facing organisations and thus they know that they need to provide a good customer experience. However, they are also often large, bureaucratic organisations with legacy infrastructure and resources, and sometimes with employees who are not appropriately skilled for their roles. Research suggests that there is a link between the experience employees have while at work and how they treat their customers. To further explore this link, surveys and interviews were conducted with councils across the country. The interviews, surveys and other research also highlighted that to make real change, councils should focus on culture, communication and …

Digital Inclusion in the Public Sector

Digital Inclusion in the Public Sector  An Update on What it Means to be Digitally Inclusive. The Issues Facing Digital InclusionMore than 20 years ago, when personal devices started becoming ubiquitous, it was identified that not everyone had access to the same technology. A digital divide had bee…

Data Warehousing: The On-Prem vs. Cloud Debate

After a year as turbulent as 2020, Public sector organisations across the world are facing societal, organisational and operational demands for increased financial restraint, efficiency, as well as more citizen-centric services that lead to positive social outcomes. Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence can help organisations overcome challenges by structuring data into meaningful and valuable information by unearthing insights and analysing trends hidden within the large stack of data that governments have gathered throughout the years. Most of today’s data warehouses, especially in the public sector environment however, cannot support the ingest of data in real-time, and are plagued by inconsistent …

Bots and the Future of Customer Experience

Before the pandemic, “it was our country’s fourth largest export industry.” To engage with potential or current students, in 2018 ENZ decided to develop a chat-bot, which is a simulation of a human conversation, using artificial intelligence (AI) features. This was “a relatively new communications channel,” meaning that “there isn’t an established formula or methodology for chat-bot implementations.” However, at the time the agency was in no rush, and Jamie Crump was studying a “Masters of Technological Futures and developed an approach for the chat-bot project.” ““Nobody wants to engage with something that is dull, slow and hard to navigate …

Data Analytics in Local Government

Local governments, like all public sector institutions, collect lots of data about their citizens. The intention is that the data will be used for good purposes to inform better decision-making, but that is not always the case. In fact, data can be used for nefarious purposes just as easily. This paper brings together three data experts from three local government jurisdictions – two from Australia and one from Canada. With a specific focus on improving the customer experience, each of them provides a perspective on how to manage data, how to work with it better by building technology around it, …

Workplace Wellbeing & Experience in a Post-Pandemic World

2020 has gotten a lot of hate. Instead of bashing the year that was some more (although it probably deserves it), I’m here to focus on something positive that 2020 bought us – an accelerated focus on workplace wellbeing & employee experience. For maybe the first time in human history we’re seeing positive developments in terms of how we work. Flexibility, mental health and overall human experience are being put ahead of mere output. Earlier this month we held the Workplace Wellbeing & Employee Experience virtual event, which was attended by almost 200 APS professionals. We surveyed our attendees to …