In November 2019, the NSW Building Commissioner, David Chandler, engaged the NSW Government’s Better Regulation Division (BRD) to improve the construction of residential buildings in NSW.
David implemented Construct.NSW – a revolutionary six pillar initiative to overhaul the NSW construction industry and address building quality issues highlighted in the Shergold Weir Report.
BRD identified that 50 out of its 186 systems held data relevant to building and construction. These systems were impacted by challenges including data quality issues, privacy considerations, multiple pieces of legislation, and secure data storage.
The NSW Data Analytics Centre (DAC) was engaged by BRD to tackle the storage and data security issues. The DAC deployed a data analytics platform, which was a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering on the Microsoft Azure Platform. The use of cloud technologies provided the flexibility to scale up the solution to meeting the growing needs of Construct.NSW.
The DAC provided BRD with the data analytics cloud tools and technologies that it required – as a regulator – to make data-driven and risk-based decisions.
The DAC also facilitated the acceleration of BRD’s data analytics product development, by providing a secure platform for BRD to build two analytics products on – the Single View of Customer (SVoC) and Single View of Business (SVoB).
In September 2019, BRD started to develop the SVoC, a tool allowing NSW Fair Trading complaints handlers and assessors to have a single holistic view of a construction licence holder or business and their complaints and compliance history. The DAC was engaged to develop a proof of concept, and later a full solution design, for the SVoC.
The SVoC currently combines four different data sources and allows users to assess traders in a centralised and efficient manner, reducing the complaints processing and turnaround time.
An additional requirement for the SVoC was to identify high risk complaints, so that these could be prioritised. Using machine learning, a risk model was built with visualisation to easily explain to a user how risk predictions were calculated.
Using the learnings gained from SVoC, BRD developed the SVoB, which was a tool released to business users in October 2020. It combines 17 source systems of data and delivers customisable dashboards for inspectors, auditors, the Building Commissioner, executives and Ministers.
The dashboards present users with information, data and analytics relevant to their role. This enables BRD to target high-risk players in the building and construction industry, in order to improve building standards and protect consumers.
What’s next?
The SVoC and SVoB both continue to be expanded and iterated upon, based on business needs and user feedback.
To learn more about the SVoC and SVoB, please contact regulatoryanalytics@customerservice.nsw.gov.au