Accelerating actionable insights

We generate actionable insights and make them available to the people who need them to make decisions.

Why this is important

In a rapidly changing digital age, we must prepare for and adapt to emerging trends, challenges, and opportunities. Our use of data and analytics is evolving, enabling us to rapidly respond to threats and opportunities and identify innovative solutions to complex problems. Achieving a truly data-driven government requires more than just providing data and information to decision makers – it requires us to generate and communicate timely, accurate and relevant insights that decision-makers can act on.

As a government, we need to understand and align strategic priorities with key questions to be addressed and provide the right context to be able to act on insights. This relies on acquiring the right data from trusted sources across government and the non-government and private sectors and making it available for analysis efficiently and safely. For example, the NSW Suicide Monitoring System which is used to inform local and state suicide prevention initiatives, has dramatically improved the efficiency of reporting on suicides, reducing the time for reporting from a year or more to a number of weeks.

Linking data (by people, business, or place) enables richer insights to be generated more rapidly and enduring deidentified linked data assets to be created for wider and ongoing use. The Pathways of Care Longitudinal Study links data on children and young people in Out of Home Care (OOHC) from various sources and includes an evidence to action process to determine priorities and actions required to inform policy and practice implementation.

A range of data analytics capabilities support the delivery of insights to decision-makers. For example, the use of advanced data analytics techniques such as machine learning and predictive modelling that provide rich, high quality and targeted insights are being embedded in data practices to accelerate the delivery of insights to decisions makers. Self-service insights hubs provide additional value to users of data, including trend analyses, visualisations, and clearly communicated key messages to inform decisions and actions. An example is the NSW Trend Atlas (see below). Modern, interoperable platforms and tools and automated data management and data analytics processes support accelerated delivery of insights to decision makers.

"There is a distinction between operational data…such as client relational management data or case management data vs data analysed to contribute to studies, to detect trends and develop better joined up services." NSW Government Data Strategy Workshop Participant

Principles

• We ensure insights are actionable, by aligning them to strategic priorities aimed at improving community outcomes, providing context, and making them available to decision-makers when they need them.
• We deliver insights to decision-makers through self-service and user-friendly data products and services.
• We accelerate delivery of insights by using modern, interoperable platforms and tools and a range of analytics techniques and by automating data management and data analytics processes wherever possible, and we maintain privacy, security and ethical standards.

Actions

Case Studies