Communicating Risk and Mitigating Threats in a Changing Cyber Security Landscape

“There is a direct financial benefit of good security practice at the customer interface, a rapid response program of how to deal with cyber events, and a quick clean-up action. Suddenly it becomes very clear that investment in your cyber security practice becomes financially understood and a viable action.

New Ways of Working

It is fair to say that the last two years have been rather tumultuous for much of Eastern Australia. In NSW in particular there were bushfires in late 2019, the pandemic that started in 2020, the floods of early 2021, and then the Delta strain of the pandemic in the second half of 2021. Nicole Grice, the Director of People, Performance, and Culture at the NSW Department of Planning, Industry, and Environment (DPIE), says that “we have been operating in a heightened crisis mode for two years now.” DPIE has been at the centre of much of the state’s response …

Accelerating Data and Automation Transformation in the Public Service

When it comes to data verification, there are essential “three possible ways of proving who I say I am: through something I have, like a document or a card; through something that I know, like a name or a password; or through who I am, like fingerprints or facial recognition.” Biometrics is related to the third of these options, and there are a number of reasons why biometrics is the preferred option. Without biometrics, the verification of identity can be time-consuming and often has to be conducted “in service centres in-person.” On top of that, “the transaction is cumbersome both …

Future of Learning and Development Insights

As such, the only way to embed L&D is through continuous and ongoing learning. At the APSC they are “adopting a continuous learning model to enable our workforce to build the critical capabilities needed to do their best work today, and the ability to learn and adapt at the speed of change.” At ESTA, Shannon Pigram says that they too are adopting an ongoing learning approach. It is about “ensuring that there are constant conversations about it and that little challenges that occur with a number of little initiatives. We then look at leveraging those against our existing workflow and …

Data Visualisation and Dashboards Techniques

As an example, many people will know the colours of Google even if they don’t see the word spelled out, and they will know the font of Disney even if it is used to write something else. A lot of these kinds of brands are ingrained in our minds because they use all four elements and because “everything that we consume visually makes use of those well-known attributes within our brains.” In an organisation like the Inland Revenue Department there are four factors that have been included in the style guide, “though more elements can be added in there.” These …

Adapting to Drive Organisational Change

At our first HR & Future of Work National Insights Virtual Event, Paul Wilding, Director of Employee Relations, Department of Education explored: Since the start of the pandemic, in particular, the concept of well-being has been bandied about across all levels of the media, the government, and the community. But why is it important in a workplace context, and how should it be applied? These are some of the questions that have been bothering Paul Wilding, the Director of Employee Relations at the Department of Education in Western Australia. In a word, he says that well-being “is really about flourishing. …

New Ways to look at Cyber Vigilance

The problem though, especially from a cyber security perspective, is that the organisation has already been set up so “we are building the house while we’re living in it.” This is especially challenging since because of COVID-19 “we’ve compressed seven years of technological investment into two.” The pandemic has meant that “the concept of work has changed forever,” whilst the impact has been “profound on all of us, individually, collectively and organisationally.” Yet at the end of the day, people and organisations are mostly concerned by what all the chaos and confusion means for them. The “culture of vigilance” needs …

Improving Communities Through Agile Local Government

Overall, their area was only mildly affected by the pandemic, but given where they are located, “locals are used to isolation and dealing with prolonged periods of loss of power.” The saying goes that “if you move to the Gulf, bring a generator.” When there is a storm, flooding or other crises, it is not uncommon for some communities to be “cut off for 10 to 14 days, but food and supplies are always available.” Partly this is because Council is responsible for supplies. There is a network of “1,662km of local roads but only 107km of these are sealed …