Supporting the VPS to use data to make better decisions

Services through Digital and Analytics Service

To help improve the understanding and use of data across the Victorian public sector, Digital and Analytics Service offers a range of services.

Strategic services, governance and advice

We support the development of data strategies for Victorian public sector organisations by:

• helping to identify and improve your organisation’s data capability
• providing resources to design and build data capability within your organisation, including products and systems
• helping to assess your organisation’s data management and governance maturity
• providing advice on data management, governance and ethics
• providing guidance on best practice and contemporary Victorian Government strategic direction related to data and technology, as well as access to other Victorian public sector organisations who have solved similar problems
• linking into support from broader subject matter specialist from within the Department of Government Services, including cyber security, platform integration and infrastructure.

We also recognise that some challenges to become a data-driven organisation are caused by accessing or sharing data. This can even be the case when sharing data within organisations. Through our partnerships, we enable the Victorian public sector to more efficiently, safely and securely share data. We do this through supporting and promoting the use of standardised data sharing arrangements under the Victorian Public Sector Data Sharing Framework. Our team of data governance experts work with organisations to tailor sharing agreements that suit the sensitivity of your data and the operating context of your organisations. By offering this service, we help the public service apply a risk-based approach to appropriately manage government data, including what data can be shared, with whom and for what purposes. This helps us to build and maintain trust in government.

Analytics and insights services

We also work with Victorian public sector organisations on data analytics projects.

We bring together and analyse data to improve your understanding about what works and why. We follow a tried and test methodology in developing analytics solutions, starting with a detailed diagnosis of your business problem, identification, assessment and cleaning of your data through to designing, development and application of solutions. We can work with you to:

• explore and understand how data can address important business problems
• identify and remediate limitations to your data’s quality
• assist in accessing or collecting new data
• co-design analytics solutions to the problems you have identified
• develop data analytics and statistical models
• embed new analytics solutions to inform policy making, service design and delivery.

Through improved reporting capabilities and using data to help in decision making, we can also help resolve common business problems, including:

• automating reporting
• enabling more effective targeted services
• identifying which projects would achieve the greatest value
• identifying early intervention points
• providing insights to previously unknown patterns
• optimising or better distributing resources.

Partnering with Digital and Analytics Service

Digital and Analytics Service intentionally partner with other agencies across the Victorian public sector to improve the use and understanding of data. Through each partnership, we work with partner teams in an agile way that prioritises the transfer of knowledge and skills to our partners. This helps improve the understanding and capability of our partners to ensure partners can continue to use, maintain and in some cases further develop the products we provide. By doing this, we strengthen the ability of the Victorian public sector to make better, data-informed decisions.

The team applies the following principles in each partnership:

• we put the user at the centre through co-design
• we work as one delivery team with a unified vision and purpose, innovating, adapting and learning together
• we work to ensure privacy and security are embedded in all we do, with governance to support the appropriate and ethical use of data
• we aim to build quality products once that can be scaled and used multiple times.

Recent partnerships

We build on our record of collaboration, with recent partnerships including with:

• Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions
• Department of Health

Partner with us

We are always keen to explore future partnership opportunities. We are looking for possible partnerships that:

• have a clear public benefit
• help government access new capabilities or data
• manage all legal, ethical, privacy and human rights concerns
• have positive social, environmental or economic impacts.

If you’re a Victorian public sector department or agency looking to assess and build up your data capability, or after advice on how to become a more data-driven organisation, please contact us on email daas@dgs.vic.gov.au.