Driving Data & Analytics Excellence in the NZ Government

Across many industries these days, it is often said that data is the lifeblood of society, and this became, even more, the case during the pandemic. Data helps government agencies to better serve their citizens, which was definitely the case during the height of various COVID-19 strains, but it is also data that makes our smartphones ‘smart’ and allows us to order products online. Yet even within all that, the people who work with data regularly question what it is, and therefore aren’t always sure how to create governance strategies around it, and how it uses it in a holistic …

Powering Performance in the Public Sector

This is where Te Ao Māori (the Māori worldview) might come in handy. “Our visions look 150 to 300 years into the future because we look at intergenerational well-being.” Māori traditions don’t always align with western culture, “but our people can generally connect to purpose, even in lieu of a vision, because many of us understand how to help achieve an organisation’s purpose.” “Being able to achieve a purpose is very important when the structure of an organisation is extremely complicated. The NZTE is the trading arm of New Zealand’s government, and has “about 800 staff operating in 52 international …

Delivering a Simplified Customer Experience to Transform Facility Venue Bookings

From time to time we ALL find ourselves needing to find and use spaces and places for different purposes. Maybe it’s for a family celebration, an offsite work meeting or to play informal sport. Maybe it’s for a workshop, a networking event, an AGM… whatever the reason, the way in which we find and use community spaces remains… difficult.

Addressing Legacy Systems & Looking to Sustainable Modernization

Clearly this is an unsustainable process, but is common across many departments, and was the standard at Veterans Affairs as well until 2015. We provided a standard IT service where business groups focused on analog processing to solve problems, but our core processing system was aging. It was over 15 years old, and rather than changing the system – which was expensive and no one knew what to change it to anyway – the department simply hired more staff to deal with “a legacy system that needed to be updated three times a year. By 2016, it was clear that …

Evolving Capabilities and Advancing Public Safety

Australian and New Zealand communities are experiencing a period of great adjustment and now more than ever it is important government agencies work together to ensure public safety and collaborative emergency response. Covid-19, crime, natural disasters, cyber threats and the increasing risk of terrorism are just some of the challenges community leaders are facing. With areas of rapid population redistribution adding to the difficulty of predicting resource allocation, up to date emergency preparedness and innovative methods of incident response are crucial to mitigating risk and protecting the public. By sharing best practice and advancing methods of response and preparedness, agencies …

Advancing Digitally Enabled Integrated Care Systems

COVID-19 was first and foremost a health crisis, so using that as an opportunity, the hospital group decided to reimagine access to care, and it allowed us to be creative. They wanted to leverage technology to produce results for their patients, whilst also being mindful of our systems and the evolving nature of COVID-19. The result was an LTC remote monitoring program. With the implementation of a specific tool, the program was designed to detect early signs of decline in the health status of residents in nursing homes. The tool that they used was Preview-ED (Practical Routine Elder Variants to …

Australia's Latest Cyber Security Challenges

We hope this article helped to inspire you with some ideas strengthening the cyber security ecosystem!

Understanding and Overcoming our Health Data Problem

Data analytics challenges are a roadblock for new digital systems that could help overcome the healthcare challenges we face. These include staff shortages, poor access to services, increased wait times, and how to care for an older population with more chronic conditions. We surveyed 180 healthcare executives across public and private organisations, large and small hospitals, and city and rural locations. What we found was that a lack of trust in data, challenges with data quality and the absence of a holistic digital transformation strategy were all hurdles to organisations using data analytics to meet their top business objectives. Despite …