National Security
and one of those’ and then a break it down further, to take them from a ‘what if ’ scenario, such as ‘what if we did this, what if we did that’. And we give that back to the agency and put it into their analytics environment or their IT environment and empower them to explore what a powerful question may be, such as a journey of a child, a family, a household, a community, a business, a building and in the world of agile for government, we start with that proof of concept and work towards that blue-sky picture.” “We give ourselves an immediate step, where we operationalise the proof of concept, and call that a minimum viable use case, and then work with that over time until we ultimately come up with a minimum viable product. Partly because when we started this journey, we weren’t sure of what we could do. So ultimately what we’re talking about is doing things differently. We’re looking to help agencies bring together those pieces of the digital world, as a way of seeing the world, use modeling, predictive capability, and analytics, as well as artificial intelligence to better understand the challenge, to better predict certain outcomes, certain stages of that journey of child, a family, a household, a community, a business, and to do the development of that ‘what if ?’. “ ‘What if ’ my challenge for juvenile justice is not just build a new jail? What if the challenge is really doing something in education or in family and community services, or in health, or something else in the Justice System? And as we’ve been developing, we’ve been following this agile process. We started out as two people, a pot plant and ten projects. Now we have 51 staff, which includes a cohort of 18 in-turns and a cohort of 35 projects, some of which we’ve taken through to making a difference in the world, and they’re the ones we want to highlight, and some of them are still at the proof of concept stage, some have reached the information management stage, where we’re going to operationalise them.” “And in order to package all these up together, we see the world, the digital world, being all digital, all joined up, and we have access to any data set. Every single question is actually just a different entry point into that digital environment. We’ve started to group our 35 projects into what are called ‘practice areas’. We get a better understanding of the community, a better understanding of the vibrancy of the community and a better understanding of the composition of the community. What we call human centric services, where we really are following that journey of a child, family, household, and realistically a victim and a perpetrator.” “We have projects around complex systems, like transport, waterways and projects around risk, and ultimately fraud and insurance. And rolling those all up is part of the design thinking and building a stronger and stronger governance around the data challenge, as we understand the data challenge more and more.” “There is a large data ecosystem being developed, as part of a digital marketplace. This was announced as part of the NSW Digital Economy Strategy earlier in 2017, and the Data Analytics Centre is part of that. We’ve just turned 2 years old, but the basis of how we collect, process, link and govern data is starting to inform a much bigger data ecosystem. This is all becoming real and as the data ecosystem continues to grow you’ll see more and more parts of government API accessible, accessed through governable
machine-controlled interfaces. This takes away the friction associated with sharing data inside government.” The DAC is the first of its kind in Australia and internationally unique due to its function and supporting legislation, with a charter to advise the NSW government on the challenges and potential solutions using data analytics, best practice data analytics, data governance and privacy measures, as well as making de-identified data open to the public. The DAC is bound by NSW privacy legislation and policies, as are the agencies involved, including the Data Sharing (Government Sector) Act 2015, Information Protection Principles, Health Privacy Principles and NSW Government Digital Information Security Policy. For more information visit www.finance.nsw.gov.au/ict/nsw-data-analytics-centre
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