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External partnerships with government departments are important to help them achieve their digital goals, according to Paul Doherty, CTO for the Department of Premier and Cabinet New South Wales (NSW).
During the Digital NSW 2024 Showcase, Doherty gave a fireside chat on building an environment that supports digital innovation.
He specifically spoke about the Premier’s Department project aimed at solving secure access challenges across the sector via platform called SectorLink.
The native Azure platform connects over 100 agencies, allowing users to log in using their own agency credentials and multi-factor authentication.
According to Doherty, the success of the project relied on valuable vendor relationships and other technology partners with skills in specific areas.
Microsoft helped the Department with the consultation and all the workshops at the beginning, said Doherty
“We also worked with a partner specifically skilled in AI (artificial intelligence),” he said. “That partnership was key to moving things forward quickly.”
Having those key partnerships in place and engaging leadership across departments helped Doherty and his team move quickly and make its project a success.
Securing access across different sectors
The Department has around 1,600 staff, with about 70 in the Digital Information branch, which gives a sense of complexity to its operations.
What sets it apart is that it supports many applications across different sectors, including other agencies and even some external jurisdictions.
“This unique challenge led us to focus on addressing secure access to applications across the sector,” he said. “A few years ago, we took on the task of solving this by building a platform called Sector Link.”
The platform is a native Azure platform built on Microsoft infrastructure, however it wasn’t designed to have many native accounts within it.
“Rather, its goal is to connect the broader sector together,” said Doherty. “To date, we’ve connected about 172 agencies across the sector.
“What that means is, if we have an app or a workload hosted on Sector Link, external users can log in using their own agency credentials and multi-factor authentication.”
Solving security challenges
According to Doherty, the work done to build connectivity and trust across all the agencies ensured secure access to applications, solved a significant identity and security challenge for the Department.
In addition to this, Sector Link includes an Azure hosting platform, which allowed the Department to deploy Azure OpenAI’s GPT resource recently.
“With this, we built our first AI chat application,” he said. “This was an exciting moment for us, as we introduced Navi, an AI-powered chat and search tool, within the Premier’s Department through Sector Link.
“Thanks to the identity and security work we had already done, this infrastructure allowed us to scale and innovate quickly.”
Lessons learnt
The first version of Navi went into production about two weeks ago, after a year-long journey to get it to that point, which led to four key lessons uncovered along the way, said Doherty.
During this time creating an environment that fosters innovation required a clear vision of what needed to be achieved. According to Doherty the NSW Government’s AI framework was critical here, providing the foundation for its Navi project.
“Beyond that, we also had to ensure that the environment was set up to remain compliant with our cybersecurity and records management standards,” he said. “For us, the focus was on moving forward securely, while still achieving innovation.”
Secondly, the key to success was ensuring that it took secure steps throughout the process, said Doherty.
“As we work across the sector, we’re mindful of security, and we’re not as customer-facing as some other agencies, but we knew there would be plenty to learn and share with others,” he said. “Securing data and ensuring compliance as we implemented AI in our processes was paramount.”
The third point was managing the risks in a landscape that is constantly changing, and AI is a rapidly evolving field, and legislation is still catching up.
“But with the great work done by the Department of Customer Services (DCS) on revising AI and introducing compliance plans, we were able to move forward without making any major missteps,” said Doherty. “We stuck to existing security protocols, conducted risk assessments, and added new elements as needed to address the unique challenges AI presents.”
The fourth lesson, learnt during the experimentation phase, was that the Department didn’t have to start from scratch.
“Microsoft, the open-source community, and other vendors had already done significant work in this area,” he said. “Their combined resources provided us with solution accelerators, and we experimented with several of them.”
This helped the Department to identify any gaps early on, such as needing a secure development and testing environment, and it helped it refine its approach.
Ongoing journey
“By failing fast, we were able to find the right solutions and adapt them to meet our needs,” said Doherty.
“Looking back on our progress, while we achieved the success outlined in our project goals, I believe success is still an ongoing journey.”
The AI field is still new to many, and user expectations can be inflated, claimed Doherty.
“While we met our scope and compliance requirements during user acceptance testing true success means ensuring the AI product meets user expectations,” he said. “We roll out the product more widely, we’re focused on managing those expectations, providing support to users, and ensuring the tool delivers the results we anticipate.”
However, the progress for the Department doesn’t stop with the progress already made.
“Our focus now is on scaling, refining, and continuing to address risks as we expand AI and innovation across the sector,” said Doherty. “It’s not just about creating apps or AI tools, but about building the infrastructure and processes necessary to keep up with the fast pace of technological change.”