Cessnock is the first and only Council to have near realtime integration with the NSW Planning Portal via an API and according to Cessnock Council’s Business Support and Customer Relations Manager, Roslyn Ashton, “it will provide significant productivity savings for Council along with further improvements in application processing times”.

Australia’s Digital Transformation Agency (DTA), established in 2016 to promote digitisation of government services, is set to undertake a digital journey of its own as part of the Commonwealth Digital Records Transformation Initiative (DRTI).

The COVID-19 pandemic has fast-tracked digital transformation for many organisations, but this has presented businesses with a range of new challenges. According to AGSM @ UNSW Business School Adjunct Faculty Member, Max Theseira, the "new normal" for businesses post-coronavirus will significantly drive digital business and digital transformation going forward.

The stunning successes of artificial intelligence would not have happened without the availability of massive amounts of data, whether its smart speakers in the home or personalized book recommendations. And the spread of AI into new areas of the economy, such as AI-driven marketing and self driving vehicles, has been driving the collection of ever more data. These large databases are amassing a wide variety of information, some of it sensitive and personally identifiable. All that data in one place makes such databases tempting targets, ratcheting up the risk of privacy breaches.