NSW DPHI: Making Citizens Central to Its Transformation

Advances in technology have enabled enterprises around the globe to serve their customers in new and better ways. The invention of smartphones, for instance, gave consumers a new way to interact with the digital world, and companies have responded by developing a wave of apps to meet our every need. 

Financial gain is often the incentive for new technology, however, governments are also leveraging it to connect with and better serve their citizens. 

A great example of this can be seen in Sydney Australia, at the New South Wales Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure (DPHI). 

Tasked with improving the liveability and prosperity of the state of New South Wales, the department is at the forefront of creating diverse spaces, precincts and economies. 

“In the New South Wales government, there has been a real focus on how we can utilise technology to connect public servants to our citizens,” explains Bianca Jordaan, the Chief Digital and Information Officer of DPHI.

With a focus on technology, but a constant eye on humanity, Bianca is helping steer the department to upskill its offerings to ensure it can meet its ambitious goals to provide for one of the fastest growing areas in Australia. 

Tech chief with a human touch

Bianca has rich experience in both the private and public sector, which has given her perspective on how to interact with third-party companies in her current role. 

She got her first taste of public service six years ago at eHealth NSW, where she led a team to drive change and adoption for the Electronic Medication Management Program. She subsequently moved back to the private sector, taking the role of CIO of Pathology at Healius Limited, which provided critical testing services during Covid-19.

Her journey back to the New South Wales government was fuelled by a deep desire to influence policy and drive meaningful change. 

“Working in government is so complex and the depth of change that we drive affects so many people,” she explains. 

Bianca brings this interpersonal approach to her role, where she champions honesty and bravery as pivotal leadership qualities. 

“For me, it's about making sure we create an environment where people can be honest, where people can be brave and where we can align everybody around the organisations’ goals.” 

Goals of the Department

The DPHI's mission is multifaceted, focusing on creating vibrant communities, increasing housing supply and diversity and managing land assets sustainably. 

In the last 10 years there has been a significant shift towards digital service delivery. 

“Citizens now expect to interact with the government digitally, akin to ordering pizza or booking movie tickets,” Bianca says. “We are at a place now where more and more people receive their services online. This has means as public servants, we need to uplift our skills and meet rising expectations.”

The DPHI has embraced technology across its wide portfolio to expand the way it serves its citizens. 

One standout example is the Land iQ application, a tool that utilises spatial information to inform strategic land use decisions. 

“We recently leveraged the app to help shortlist plots of land that could be used to respond to the state’s housing crisis,” Bianca explains. “This meant that surveyors and planners didn’t have to travel all over the state to find appropriate places for housing, they could narrow down options thanks to AI technology.” 

Other technological implementations include systems for managing fishing licences, digital planning services, as well as mapping and reporting tools to assist proposed developments. There is even a Beach Watch application, which provides information on water cleanliness and safety at beaches. 

Challenges and Solutions

Implementing technology is not easy, however. After all, the NSW Government serves a population of over eight million. 

While technology plays a crucial role in the DPHI's digital transformation, Bianca emphasises the importance of the human element in this process. 

“We need to talk to people about what we are trying to achieve and not just about the technology,” she explains. Deploying new technologies is challenging. People, with their diverse backgrounds, skills, and resistance to change, often present the greatest hurdles. 

Through collaboration and consultation the department is committed to ensuring that technological advancements are not just implemented, but truly understood and embraced by staff, stakeholders and citizens alike. 

What makes managing technology in the public sector particularly challenging, is the shift in services included in each department. “During the three years I’ve been here, we have had four significant restructures,” Bianca explains. “It means technology from very different organisations keeps getting pushed together and then pulled apart.” 

Adding to the complexity are aging systems and hardware that require constant upgrades, an expensive exercise in a fiscally challenged environment. 

One major difficulty is ensuring sustainable investment in technology post-COVID. “Following COVID, the investment in technology was significant. We are now at a point where we have to ensure that that investment is sustainable,” Bianca acknowledges. 

Another challenge is managing the excitement and fear surrounding emerging technologies like Generative AI. “We are putting in place an assurance framework to help teams assess if they are implementing the technology in a safe manner and to ensure they understand where the data is. These safeguards, alongside decisions on what the technology is going to be doing, are crucial to keeping people involved in the decision-making process," she elaborates.

This is critically important given the types of personal data governments collect, including health details, addresses and financial information.

To address these challenges, DPHI has developed a digital strategy that covers not just technology, but also the people and processes required to deliver key outcomes. 

“A lot of work has gone into identifying the core, common and divergent capabilities required to deliver the department’s vision,” says Bianca. “We are laser focused on being an agile organisation through a number of key initiatives:

• Re-imagining NSW Communities, Visitor and Business centric services

• Investing in collective digital and data capabilities to save time and money 

• Ensuring the ‘basics’ are done consistently to benefit all our customers 

• Defining how the department delivers using digital tools to serve our citizens 

“We are aiming to become more citizen-centric. We are focused on how we put more information and more services in the citizen's hands and improve the way our department is able to work.” 

Partnerships and Collaborations

The department is also exploring how it can use data to gather insights and improve services. 

“We are sitting on a lot of really interesting data. It's not only financial information and normal business process data, but spatial data, and what this data can show us is powerful,” she notes.

Pushing ahead, DPHI has ambitious plans for how data and AI can be used to benefit NSW. Yet, with all these new assets coming online, it is important to keep track and also protect highly confidential governmental data.  

Which is why the department brought on an established partner to aid in this challenge: Axonius.

“Prior to implementing Axonius, we faced challenges in gaining visibility into all our assets and ensuring consistent security policy enforcement across the board,” Bianca Wirth, the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at DPHI says. 

“Axonius provided us with a cybersecurity asset management platform that helped us aggregate, normalise and correlate data from various sources, giving us a complete and always up-to-date asset inventory. This has been instrumental in uncovering security gaps and automating remediation actions.”

This proved pivotal during the department’s Cyber Security Uplift Program. Across NSW AU$315m (US$205m) was allocated and is part of the broader work of the Digital Restart Fund (DRF) to provide trusted and secure services to the people of NSW. With Axonius in tow, the department was able to establish a detailed view of devices, users and cloud instances, and identified far more applications than they thought existed. 

“We utilised this information to consolidate our desktop standard operating environment (SOE) by identifying non-SOE devices – applications that needed to be packaged and deployed, and verifying that we had captured new devices logging into the network at regular intervals,” explains Bianca Wirth. 

This allowed the department to streamline its security operations and improve its overall security posture, allowing it to be more proactive in addressing vulnerabilities and ensuring compliance as it grew.

A department prepared for the future

As new technologies are introduced, Bianca believes it is critical that citizens and businesses are kept informed. “We need to understand our customers, address their concerns and partner with businesses to see how technology can enhance not be an obstacle for their operations” she says. 

DPHI is committed to drive sustainable development and improve the liveability of the state by leveraging the power of technology.

From implementing innovative solutions to address pressing challenges such as the housing crisis and environmental sustainability, the seeds the department has planted – although already yielding insights – stand to grow and offer unprecedented efficiency to its workflow.

“A lot will happen in the housing space with the approvals of housing and land development, like how we can more seamlessly do approvals and how we can fast track approvals using technology,” Bianca explains.

By focusing on citizen-centric services, improving internal workflows and managing its assets with Axonius as its partner, the DPHI is well-positioned to continue its mission of creating vibrant communities and ensuring the prosperity of New South Wales.

People’s needs have not changed. But how they receive services has. This synergy of citizen-centric services, augmented by technology, may not only bring about better value for the department, but a better society for all.