Extending Governance Reach. Elevating Quality. Powered by AI - Cassandra Bisset - Episode 177

[Music] Welcome to the Public Sector Podcast, a podcast designed to connect you with the greatest minds in government. This presentation was recorded live at a public sector network event. Enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Objective. Objective creates software that makes a difference. Helping public sector organisations take control of their information. Strengthening governance, reducing risk and enabling better decisions. Because when information is trusted, everything works better. I thought I'd start by just rewinding back to last year and just maybe a show of hands who was a long last year at InnovateVic. About a third of the room maybe. So last year we were talking about a range of opportunities, changes and some key areas that people were really focused on. A lot of chat around governance, policy structures, legalities and really how we're thinking about the feel of bringing different technologies in to the workplace. And we heard some different ideas about, guess elevating the workforce as well, what skills do we need? How do we think about bringing capabilities into different staff and different pockets of the organisation? I think Nonahead on one of the panels is a really interesting point of view that RMIT are giving more capabilities to people who have higher levels of literacy and higher views, points of view on data governance. We saw Nick Hill talk about DGS, kind of that backbone infrastructure and architecture. And then some chat around things like hallucination. And I think for most folks, when we kind of clocked the room on how many people were being pressured to put AI into their projects, every hand went up. And that was very telling back then. You could see there was a lot of uneasiness, opportunity as well. But I think what we're seeing today, and I don't think we could have predicted the pace of change in this last year. So my analog rewind is very telling because it feels like what we thought we were facing or what we thought we were going to be up to is just rapidly changed. I think if you're sitting in the office, if you're just at home at night, kind of reading through news articles and stuff, what you'll see and feel is this pace of change is being echoed internationally. And I pull up this article from essentially off the back of South by Southwest in the US last week, Amy Weber, futurist, who really writes on, "Way out, what's happening in the years ahead?" And then the trends you might be spotting today has really killed off her own annual tech trends report. It's been going for 18 years. And sometimes we've got to leave the things behind us that got us to today and really think about what's going to get us to the future. I think what's interesting about this moment is we're moving away from trends that could impact us, and that was kind of Adam hinted at that in his plenary speech from DGS around, you know, if we're only fixing the things right in front of us, we're not going to get far enough out to innovate for the things that will be expected of us in 10 years to come in 20 years to come. And this convergence report, I'll give you the, it's 300 pages, so I really encourage any of you to sit in policy or are really kind of curious about where technology might take you in the years to come to have a read of it. I think if anyone wants the Cliff Notes, Cheat, YouTube, South by Southwest, Amy's talk, gives you an hour of content that you can do in 1.5 times speed, because I know we all just want the magical answer. But fascinating time to really think about, well, what's impacting how he might show up at work? Ideas around augmenting your body, how you sleep, what performance might look like for some of the jobs we have in the future. But then also, you know, we had kind of touching on ideas on policy this morning around, well, who's going to dominate our core assets like water and power, who gets those first in the years to come? Is it the people that have the deepest pockets or is it the public service that needs at most? And these are things that we're having to plan for now that technology is deeply impacting where we're going to go and the future that we're going to have to plan for. There's some cool stuff in there as well. I think if any of you have done a caretaker role or have been really struggling with loneliness, you know, some really interesting innovation coming there. But also what's expected with say hospital care, patient life care as well. So our ways of work are rapidly changing. I think in Judy Hurtich's poll at the beginning of the plenary, you might have seen maybe not as much implemented technology, but a lot of prototypes doubling away. And I think as we look to the ask of governments internationally, we're seeing some kind of agitation they're going on, the big mission of how we're going to bring this digital experience into effect and into life. What does that mean? And you'll see in the I should actually change this because the America AI plan to get refreshed at the beginning of the week. But the story there is really about this race for AI, like who's going to get to the moon first, you know, who's going to weaponize AI as a country and really be leading the pack. So we touched on those ideas of really people, you know, getting ahead of the game, maybe discarding some governance ideas, some ethical ideas to really innovate fast. And that doesn't sit quite the same in our country and I guess in the way we perceive technology to play a role in our daily lives. But when we think about digital government, digital experience, customer experience, overall, we're all being kind of challenged with this idea of what's to come. And I think a number of you have struggled with this do more with less idea. We've been feeling it for years. It's been very impactful for a number of ways, how we work, what we have to prioritize, what we don't do. And I think this is probably the year where I've seen so much more conflict around we need to do more and do less at the same time to really move our agenda and mission forward because we don't have enough funding to go and chase the things that are going to be really key to setting up for the future. And then we're going to be really tricky time in deciding where funding goes and where we put our resources. I don't know, are you all feeling that? Are you feeling it's a bit harder? It is, it really is, it's getting tricky. So I think when we think about, I guess the business cases of where people are turning their attention, there's a couple of key areas that I'll touch on. This is gardener data. You can look up the report code at the bottom, but the defend idea we've talked a little bit about today, it's kind of personal productivity or return on employee. How many minutes can you get me to be more active or more productive in the day. What I found was that really wasn't giving us the returns of this big productivity promise that we've been chasing what it really did was make it feel a little bit better at work, maybe make me do a bit less hunting around to be easier to get the answers that I'm kind of trying to find. So we've got to get all this idea of extending. How do we really reshape some of these big activities and the outputs that we're trying to drive in a very different way. And this was an interesting piece where people who really focused in on this, the hard stuff, not the low hanging through the big tricky stuff, we're really starting to see results. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in return, millions of dollars in return, and it's where we need to kind of come back to thinking and I do completely appreciate the points before on human centered design because government is expert at this to know how to think about problems and put the person or the problem at the middle of it and then the service design around this. It's where we need a lot more muscle to go at the moment. If we think to the right up ending completely radically changing the way we go about business, government won't do tons of this because trust is a core. We have governance, we have all these operating regulations and responsibilities, but in pharmaceuticals, interestingly seeing massive breakthroughs in time to releasing new medications or new possibilities in treating disease. In weeks, not years, you know, in thousands of dollars, not millions of dollars of investment. And that really matters. It also matters for policy design to think about, well, how do we test faster? How do we get these things into market faster? What does that mean for licensing and fee structures and so forth? But it's also interesting when we think about the medical system, well, if I can have deterioration in my care detected 14 hours sooner than a nurse who's busy could do, well, that has a huge impact on my life care, but also the care that's administered in hospital and hopefully detected ahead of me actually needing to turn up in a hospital. So there's some real opportunities to think about, you know, how to evolve around these pieces, but they won't come by just looking, you know, immediately in front of us and those kind of basic productivity gains. I think we've heard a bit of sentiment about what people are focused on, but I think that's really important. I think this start in Ghana, this is global analysis, is really interesting because 50% of AI projects are failing. And that is really startling. If we think about, we're already budget constrained, we're already overburdened, how are we going to get these productivity gains? And I want to hit on just a couple of things that have really stood out. And we've heard themes around this today, kind of security, risk, governance, controls. I think the thing that I observe and you're probably feeling is there's all this talk about it, but no one's really showing the breadcrumb trail of exactly how to get there, or what right looks like, or what a remedy could be like, lots of discussions. I think that's something in sharing that's going to become really critical to make sure people don't go down lots of dead ends. Otherwise, this will be the statistic that we're talking about, and it'll just get bigger and bigger. So when we think about the projects that we kind of set out to do, I think this really shone a lie on some tricky problems that we've been facing. Like, great, I give us this magical set of answers. From our data, oh, from the rubbish heap that we've been kind of collecting and dragging along with us for years, I'm being facetious, of course, it's all work that we've created and captured and generated. But a lot of investment went in the last 10 years to structured data. A lot of the conversations we're having at this conference is around structured data, or semi-structured data. And so part of the challenge is a lot of our business questions from the unstructured stuff. It's from the shared drive. It's from hundreds of line of business systems where you're keeping pros heavy information. And that's the stuff that generated by our really needs to eat and lunch out on to really move forward. But I think the critical gap for most people, and I'll just pick on a couple of these challenges, is that the data not being ready has really been what's letting us down. So if we can't get trusted answers out of the services that we're putting in place and these investments, we're not only not getting the productivity gains, but people lose confidence internally. I'm not really as likely to try the next trick or the next opportunity, because I already know that I can't trust this thing you've put in front of me. So getting information right is been really key. It's pulling curated sets together. It's context. It's enriched information that's optimized for these AI services. So ultimately, when we're looking at escalated costs, we're not burning heaps of calories on all the junk. We're just very purposely processing the things that are going to get us the right information out the engine. And I think we've also talked about this idea of all business value. The day of reckoning will come where we're not going to see the budgets, or we're not going to have the same access to play money and have a go. We actually need to be solving things that are really going to move our mission forward and really critically deliver a value back to the business. And so coming back to that middle column of the Gartner analysis of what are those big pillars of change that you're going to think about is really going to impact for years to come. So I realize that this may not be the most inspiring 10 minutes that you've had, but where do we go from here? What's the opportunity ahead? And how do we kind of take that next step? I think there's a couple of approaches, and this is agnostic to technology, but really thinking about, well, how do you put your hands on the information that matters to you? How are you going to create these purposeful views of information that are optimising ready to then do the next step with? It could be predictive modelling. It could be a better way of asking questions of your information so that you can respond rapidly, which is a challenge a lot of us have when we get that kind of four o'clock in the afternoon question from the leadership team. How do we think about controlling risk by design? So rather than it just being processed magically through the engine, how do we go back and do root cause work? How do we make sure our business's usual approaches are actually set up to intervene, to remediate, so that we're not carrying the problems forward? And then I think ultimately we really want to be able to put our hands on that insight, that intelligence, which might set us up for many different things for years to come, but is really being able to guide us in the decisions that we need to make. And I want to touch on Bowen water, who I think have done some really great ground work in setting up this scaffolding of information, really to prepare themselves for all of the adventures ahead, but really going and dealing with some of the structural issues in information management. And let's face it, if I ask all of you, how often you love to get that tap on the shoulder about destroying information or information classification, everyone kind of rapidly exits the room. But these are things that you foundationally need to have built in now to set yourselves up for the success with this AI adventure ahead. So I think if you know anyone over at Bowen, if you don't come and have a chat, and I'm happy to connect you up with some folks here, who are doing some really great work. So I think building that strong foundation, the information integrity is absolutely critical, but ultimately what we don't want to be is one of those statistics. So there's a bit of daggy or boring work to be done, and I was lucky enough to be over at Digital Scotland in November. And I really loved this idea that they brought up, which was Dull AI. It wasn't the shiny toys. It wasn't kind of all the gadgetry. It was just really foundational work so that all this information need is going to be driven smoothly for the years to come. So ultimately, what we want to be able to do is get these steps in place, but really have a trust centre that we can turn to, that we know when we're going to ask questions of information, we're going to get the right answers, pass-ordered, and meet that kind of public trust promise. But we also want to be able to bake in the things that are really going to help drive this performance layer for years to come, because it's not going to be a moment. It's going to be that experience of what we saw 10 years of investment in structured data give us. We really need to be thinking about what does our unstructured information need from us now so that we can drive the goals and the mission forward. So I think a lot of the programs I help public sector with and organisations like yourselves with at the moment is really that preparation piece. How do we leverage what we've already got but reinvented in a slightly different way and enrich it in a way that really drives our goals right through to delivering on that productivity promise. Interestingly, a lot of demand and interest of people doing private rag or private services that they're setting up, not just using common services like co-pilot, still a lot of people looking at how do I bring disparate information together and make that accessible and available to co-pilot so I get a holistic answer. So still lots of opportunity. I'm really thank you for your time today. We'll be on the booth at the show showroom and love to chat with you on what's working well, what you're struggling with and the opportunity ahead. Thank you. Want to hear more like this? Go to publicsectornetwork.co and sign up today for more free content. Helping public sector organizations take control of their information, strengthening governance, reducing risk and enabling better decisions because when information is trusted, everything works better.