From Innovation Track to Real Impact, Karen Abey on Digital Transformation in Hobart

Benji Crooks, Marketing Director, Public Sector recently sat down with Karen Abey, Director Strategic and Regulatory Services Network at the City of Hobart, in the lead up to Abey's panel discussion on AI, Emerging Technologies, and Digital Transformation at Local Government Innovation Day.

Karen Abey has recently taken part in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative with a core focus on innovation in the public sector.

"The City of Hobart then undertook an extension of that program referred to as the Innovation Track, with a 10 month deep-dive on how to incorporate innovation to solve difficult issues. One of the resources we were referred to was The Path to Public Innovation Playbook, a resource created by Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg Centre for Public Innovation. It is freely available and I highly recommend it. The work we did with this program has helped to elevate innovation within the organisation more broadly. The City of Hobart has innovation as one of its core values and developing these ways of working is an ongoing focus for us."

Karen Abey spoke of the valuable insights and changes she was able to take away from the programme and introduce back into her role.

"The most valuable insight was how practical an innovation-based approach can be. It is something which can be incorporated into your every-day working life to shake up the way you do things and make sure that you’re approaching your work with efficiency, authenticity and with the community at front-of-mind."

Further to that, I asked about what innovation idea or way of working had come out of the programme and had already been in use in the City of Hobart. Karen Abey was keen to tell me about the bear and honey pot analogy and how it helped in a session for the team to become more effective and efficient.

"We have developed a toolkit of innovation approaches, many of which align with the Luma Institute. A key idea I liked to set the mood is the bear and honeypot story about workers using some crazy thinking to lead to good ideas. This was really useful when we did a session to look at how we could make our development services more efficient, effective and enjoyable for us and developers. It set the scene for the team to think outside the square. We then spent 2 hours using tools such as rose / bud / thorn to generate ideas to answer our “how might we” question. This included a creative matrix to push our ideas into specific themes. We came away with a bunch of ideas which we have been progressively implementing."

As Karen Abey is set to appear at Local Government Focus Day, I was keen to ask about AI or emerging technologies and if they featured as innovations that were learnt from the course, and if so, how have they been integrated.

"AI was part of our development services review but the best ideas came from our people who know what the issues are and with the innovative approach, this unlocked a bunch of potential solutions, some of which were IT based but others were surprisingly straight-forward like more meetings in person at key points in the process."

As Karen Abey prepared for her upcoming panel discussion on “AI, Emerging Technologies, and Digital Transformation”, she shared what she’s most looking forward to discussing with attendees.

"I think I was asked to speak because of the AI software that we are using to track short stay (eg Airbnb) use of dwellings in Hobart. I’m happy to speak to the enormous efficiencies that has provided and led to very accurate data set with streamlined compliance action to follow.

I’m also keen to talk about my broader experience with the Innovation Track to hopefully inspire others to go down this path. It doesn’t have to be hard; you don’t have to be particularly creative. It just takes a little bit of commitment to being prepared to think outside the square and becoming familiar with the tools you can use."

You can see Karen Abey and more at the Local Government Focus Day on 27 March.