Local Government’s Digital Transformation Moment: Protecting Data, Partnering Smarter, and Creating Community Value

Benji Crooks, Marketing Director at Public Sector Network, sits down with Matt Romaine, General Manager, City Futures, City of Charles Sturt, to discuss what “digital transformation” really means for councils, how to balance AI adoption with cloud and cybersecurity priorities, why digital-first culture requires new kinds of partnerships, and how councils can uplift capability through collaboration and microcredentials, ahead of his appearance at Local Government Focus Day South Australia.

Benji Crooks:

Perfect. Okay, so to start off, if you could just introduce yourself, your role, and the organization you work for.

Matt Romaine:

Uh, my name’s Matt Romaine. I’m the General Manager of City Futures at the City of Charles Sturt.

Benji Crooks:

Perfect. And so starting off, what does digital transformation mean for you, and what outcomes matter the most to your organization and community?

Matt Romaine:

I think digital transformation for Charles Sturt is really just about creating community value. But I think for local government as a sector, it’s about recognizing what our sector brings to the AI space, and in particular our local data and what that might mean for the tech roadmap going forward.

Our sector probably over the years hasn’t been great at commercializing our data and being recognized for what we do actually offer. And so I think finding ways to get a seat at the table rather than have stuff sold to us is really important.

Benji Crooks:

Perfect. So going on to AI tools, cloud migration, cybersecurity, how do you uplift these together, and how do you decide which ones to prioritize first?

Matt Romaine:

In terms of prioritizing initiatives, I think there’s a two-speed approach. I think IT teams in local government are actually really quite switched on these days. And certainly at Charles Sturt, we’re a very mature organization in that security and cloud space. And also in a data sense, we’ve got our act together.

I think what you’ll see in businesses moving forward, and councils are no different, is that IT teams will be more about keeping us safe. And perhaps the thinking about how tech can help us make better decisions and realize that community value, you might see that emerging out of different parts of the business.

So I think you’d say the prioritization discussion is likely to be strategy-led, and the security discussion is likely to be operationally led by our IT teams, which have worked really hard in this space over the last probably 20 years.

Benji Crooks:

Great. And I feel like you’re answering some of the question I’m about to ask there, about IT teams keeping us safe, but what do you think has been the biggest shift that organizations have had to put digital-first culture in place, and what has made that change stick?

Matt Romaine:

I think the biggest shift needed inside organizations, and I think it’s early. I think we’ve seen the on-premise world have an impact. Then we’ve seen the SaaS world have an impact. And I think we’re kind of at the crest of the wave in the AI space. I don’t think we’re anywhere near there yet, as it were.

I think the biggest shift is going to be partnering with the private sector to enable us to know what is possible so that we can kind of leverage. So rather than us just coming up with ideas, it might be that someone else needs to look at our data and tell us what they think could happen, because we may not know.

So the shift is being open to working with other private partners and not just procuring solutions that we’ve self-devised through a time and materials contract.

Benji Crooks:

Mm-hmm. So we, I think we’ve talked about quite a few of them already, but AI tools, cloud migrations, cybersecurity, but with all these new technologies, how do you keep your workforce capability up to standard, and how do you change the ways of working for all these tools?

Matt Romaine:

Yeah, I think in terms of ways of working and capability of staff, there’s a few different approaches. I think the first one is that openness to working with a private sector partner, and potentially broadening the bandwidth of staff members and their ability to kind of see the art of the possible. I think that will increase over time with that relationship formed.

Then there’s some other really interesting models out there to help people self-teach. There are some universities in Adelaide now that are offering microcredentials, and we’re exploring that. So it might be that a staff member can do a one-day course in prompt engineering, as it were, and they would get a formal university qualification for that, and we’re exploring all of those types of things.

Benji Crooks:

Amazing. So you’ll be at our Local Government Focus Day in South Australia. What is one of the key things that you’re hoping the audience will take away from this session that you’re in?

Matt Romaine:

Key takeaway for that session for me is: if people leave that room recognizing that local government isn’t just a cash cow. I don’t want the next 30 years to see our sector having to buy products at top dollar when the IP that we have and the data that we have really creates that fundamental blueprint for these software products to be developed.

And what’s happened in the past, I think too much is that we’ve given that IP away and given that data away to software companies to go away and develop products and then commercialize them only to sell them back to us, potentially at a premium.

So I think the opportunity for our sector is: don’t give your IP away, don’t give your data away, and let’s get a proper seat at the table and be recognized for what we bring to the AI story.

Hear Matt Romaine at Local Government Focus Day South Australia as part of Government Innovation Week South Australia. Matt will appear in the session “Beyond Modernisation: Accelerating Digital Transformation in Local Government”, exploring how councils can protect and leverage local data and IP in the AI era, uplift capability through smarter partnerships, and balance innovation with the operational fundamentals of cloud and cybersecurity.