Across australia, we’re seeing significant Digital Transformation projects underway… and none more under the microscope than the activities of the Digital Transformation Agency.
But there’s no doubt the newly appointed chief executive Gavin Slater has a massive undertaking.
Keeping pace with innovation, delivering a 360-degree customer view and ensuring data scientists can do a meaningful job within a reasonable timeframe should be the key determinants of any transformation project.
Consider though, that most agencies are still running off 30-year-old systems that aren’t set up for big data manoeuvring. This leaves many in a predicament: driven to take advantage of new innovations but with the impediment of an existing infrastructure that simply prohibits progress.
Underlying the issue is the overwhelming — almost suffocating — amount of historical, uncategorised and unruly data scattered across the organisation in data silos.
Data can be the fuel that powers your innovation-driven growth and digital transformation journey. It has the ability to improve an agency’s agility, speed, performance and provide cost savings.
But as we’ve seen, harnessing data and bringing different data silos together is also the biggest hurdle in large-scale digital transformation projects, especially in the public sector.
We know a thing or two about this. Over 50% of our revenue comes from picking up and completing failed projects that began on traditional relational database technology — including the massive U.S. healthcare.gov or ‘Obamacare’ website.
From our experiences, we have gained deep knowledge into the key drawbacks of existing data management tools, and how you can get around them.
First, how do you know if your data is working against you? Here are the major warning signs:
The diverse data — structured and unstructured — you need to support “next gen” consumer engagement, administrative, financial and clinical solutions is highly fragmented across various systems. You are unsure about the data lineage and who has access to the data.
Consider that 80% of today’s data is unstructured or semi-structured — for example PDFs, online data, audio files and video clips. How can any agency deliver robust services to citizens without having the functionality and ability to recall this information through simple search?
Meanwhile we see huge agencies who want to leverage these data assets. They gather the data, build massive and expensive data lakes — but then can’t use them because the data isn’t governable.
Data governance is more important now than ever because agencies are contemporaneously moving to the cloud.
