This week has epitomised what the LGAQ is all about. We dealt with the here and now by practically helping and advocating for councils around all matters Cyclone Debbie (with Propel fielding thousands of calls on behalf of affected councils), plus the LGAQ kicked off the 2017 EMU program at 30 centres around the state. These are important undertakings but my personal highlight of the week was the meetings our tech evangelist Lou Boyle and I had in Sydney with senior global executives from Amazon Web Services, Accenture and Everledger to develop a data lake strategy. This was the formal follow up to our whirlwind trip to Europe and the USA in January.
Hopefully in the next few months the LGAQ will be able to announce a world leading service to our member councils emanating from a local government specific data lake and analytics capability giving elected members and senior council executives real time tools to boost understanding, productivity and customer service.
As we learned in Sydney, data, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning is changing organisations. Local governments need to go down this path to improve the way they do business and create value. In this hyper-charged frenetic world you can never stand still, never stop searching for the better, cheaper way and that's what the LGAQ does for its members, constantly.
At Local Government House we walk in both worlds - the here-and-now, and the future.