#151 Leveraging data for better citizen outcomes with Simon Herbert, Chief Data Officer at NSW Customer Service Department
Simon Herbert, NSW Customer Service Department’s Chief Data Officer.
In this week’s episode, Felipe will be speaking with Simon Herbert, NSW Customer Service Department’s Chief Data Officer.
Simon has worked for the NSW Data Analytics Centre for over three years. He has been instrumental in the transformation of the DAC to an agile culture.
Simon and his team have built an advanced analytics service in the commercial cloud which delivers the enhanced capability and scalability to support the Customer Service department and NSW Government as a whole.
Simon has over 20 years of experience in data, technology and transformation in many different countries including the UK, US, Singapore and Hong Kong. He has worked for companies such as Macquarie, Westpac, HSBC, IBM and Motorola.
Simon was recognised as one of the top 20 CIOs in Australia as part of the 2019 and 2020 CIO50 awards.
Quotes:
Data response like that into three areas, there was how are we going to manage the infection risk? What is going to be the social impact of COVID-19? And then the third one was, how are we going to economically recover from COVID-19.
The social impacts have actually turned out to be what we call lag indicators. So, whilst there was the event of COVID and the lockdowns here in New South Wales, the actual impact of that, at a social level could actually go on for some time. In actual fact, there are some studies in Europe, which means it could go up to at least two years.
You can look at your postcode, you kind of understand what's going on with COVID. You know how many infections are occurring in your postcode. You understand how many how much testing has been done, and we hope to at some point, report that vaccinations as well.
It's very important that you have data governance outside of data science or data services, there is a Chinese wall to make sure that a steward can actually go up and say, no, you can't do that. The privacy Impact Assessments did not occur, which we cannot release. That's really important to have those kinds of controls in place.
What behavioural insights do is actually improves outcomes by understanding people better and their behaviour.
They have such a deep understanding of our behaviour and the way that they do that they're testing first their control groups and their rollout. But it's very scientific, and they can make a significant impact on a number of outcomes throughout the state.
Anybody who works in the data knows that you're part of the backroom. You know, the service delivery is by somebody in a contact centre, somebody on the telephone, or maybe in a digital chat, the insights and the way that that interaction occurs, normally is assisted by data. And to be honest. I quite like the fact that we were in the back room. That's what we do. We support.
There is quite a lot of concern by people around the ethics of AI. You need to be very careful how you use that internally for the concern of citizens, but also internally from employees feeling that they may lose their jobs because they're going to be replaced by deep learning algorithm.
And so the application of deep learning definitely can give some significant benefits. But you do need to make sure that everybody understands the benefits. You haven't put any bias in and all the other things, we need to be very careful around deep learning.
The deep learning algorithm was actually ending up giving a better classification than the rule engine and the humankind of view. So that was an example of how deep learning can really add to the productivity of our New South Wales government.
Digital transformations are wholly dependent on a successful data transformation underneath. You can create a beautiful website or a great app, a great digital experience. But if you don't have the integration, the data and the flow underneath and the automation, your digital transformation is basically just painting lipstick.
Data professionals need to team up with digital professionals really well. And both parties need to really doff hat to the other, which is, as I understand, digital professional, you are going to take the data that I produced or the insights I'm producing, and you're going to create an experience for the customer. Okay, and vice versa, digital professional, please give respect to the data professional, who's actually going to make that data and those insights available to you.
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