#151 Leveraging data for better citizen outcomes with Simon Herbert, Chief Data Officer at NSW Customer Service Department

Data Futurology - Leadership And Strategy in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science

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.

He 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.

He was recognised as one of the top 20 CIOs in Australia as part of the 2019 and 2020 CIO50 awards.

Quotes:

• 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.
  
• 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.
  
• 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.

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Read the full episode summary here: Ep 151

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