HR & Future of Work Roadshow 2022 Highlights

The work of government and the way government works is changing, yet there continues to be a preoccupation with cost optimisation, cost reduction, and sustainable cost management. This has required HR to play its part, largely through making the HR function more efficient, but not necessarily more effective. The people aspect in government organisations contains some truly business-critical issues and the need for HR to rise to these challenges has never been more acute.

Speaker Spotlight Q&A: Whitney Phillips, State Privacy Officer, State of Utah

Meet Whitney Phillips, State Privacy Officer, State of Utah Dr. Whitney Phillips was confirmed by the Utah Senate in December 2021 as the first State Privacy Officer. Prior to serving in this role, she spent four years as the Utah State Board of Education’s first Chief Privacy Office, and has held a variety of prior positions in education and government. Dr. Phillips is a Certified Information Privacy Manager (CIPM) and a Certified Information Privacy Professional for the U.S. (CIPP). She received her Ph.D. in Educational Inquiry, Measurement, and Evaluation from Brigham Young University, specializing in longitudinal data analysis.

Leadership and Workforce Management: Shaping the Next Normal

From a procurement perspective, we had to work really quickly with vendors and had to make emergency purchases. We also had to do things a lot faster than normal, making some people uncomfortable. However, in a way the pandemic came at a good time for the organization. Less than a year before the pandemic, we switched out our desktops for laptops. At the time it was a big change that was very disruptive in itself, but it ended up making a real difference. There were some working-from-home practices already in place, but for most staff it was foreign territory. So …

Evolving Enterprise Architecture Frameworks to Transform & Enhance Customer Value

In a broad sense, the EA profession works in the digital space, and that means “anything that’s technology related,” or in other words, “helping agencies to digitally enable their services for their customers.” In Queensland however this is not quite where it should be because “we are lagging behind most other states in terms of digital transformation.” Nonetheless, the state is eager to update their “digital data and ICT governance, but only in the sense that it sets guardrails and then gets out of the way.” From a governance and resources perspective, as the pandemic subsides, “we all needed to …

Building a Solid Foundation & Strategy to Enable Digital Acceleration

In the course of a day, “we are confronted with quite often a lot of information.” But most of it isn’t particularly useful. It is necessary to be able “to see what really matters.” This is where data literacy comes in. It is about “the visualisation and the interpretation of critical data.” says David Evans, Director, Business Analytics, WorkSafe Victoria The concept of data integration can mean different things to different people, but for this purpose, it means “joining, combining or linking data from more than one source.” Generally, the data needs to have shared characteristics, so that it should …

Delivering agile citizen-centred services through successful API transformation

There are many technologies that have been designed to improve our lives and enhance the way we interact and communicate, from laptops and mobile phones to smart devices and virtual assistants. Many of them are underpinned by Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, which work behind the scenes but ensure that the devices operate the way they are supposed to. In fact, APIs are so prevalent and versatile that they are used even in fields or workplaces that might at first seem unlikely. Generally, APIs are the back-end software processes that allow devices to run, and they are regular and consistent. …

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 …