We want WA Government services, operations and policy decisions to be as intelligent as they can be. We know that data is a valuable asset that can help us improve the quality and efficiency of government services and deliver a healthier society, environment and economy. This means using good data insights to inform what we do, from design to delivery.
Our objectives
- Provide more and better ways for you to engage with the WA Government.
- Use data to inform and evaluate WA Government decisions, operations and services.
- Create the enabling environment for safe and effective data sharing.
Our approach for informed decisions
The WA Government will continue to listen to and learn from Western Australian people and businesses. To do this, we’ll provide you with more ways to engage with us.
We’ll develop user-friendly ways to enable you to tell us what matters to you or your business. Understanding community feedback will help government to improve the way we design and deliver our services, and invest in the things that matter to you.
New approaches to engagement mean you’ll be able to more easily learn about the initiatives and programs we’re working on, and how your feedback is influencing change.
We’ll accelerate data sharing and the development of analytics capabilities across government. Good data insights will inform the design, evaluation, improvement and delivery of our services and operations. Importantly, these insights will also help us make good policy decisions for Western Australian people and businesses.
We know that data analytics is enabled by responsible information sharing. We’ll continue to work towards overcoming legislative and cultural barriers to sharing information, where there are compelling public interest reasons to do so.
At the same time, we want to make sure that we share and use data responsibly. We’re building a legislative responsible information sharing framework that will assist agencies to assess how to share, link and analyse data, and to implement robust governance around that sharing.
We’ve conducted a whole of government data sharing and analytics pilot that demonstrates the value of sharing and analytics to assist with COVID-19 recovery. Based on the learnings from the pilot, we’ll keep building our whole of government data sharing and analytics capabilities.
Our initiatives for informed decisions
Responsible information sharing framework
We’ll build a robust responsible information sharing framework to help agencies share data safely.
Data hub
We’ve piloted a central data hub and we’ll continue to develop our capability to bring data sets from agencies together, to enable us to derive whole of government data insights.
Social Investment Data Resource
We developed the Social Investment Data Resource, which links data from multiple agencies to support early intervention and improve policy outcomes. We’ll continue building our capability to use linked data to improve outcomes for Western Australians.
Open data
From humble beginnings, WA’s open data portal now holds over 2000 data sets. We’ll be reviewing the strategy supporting the data.wa.gov.au portal to ensure we continue to advance the open data agenda of making government data easy to find, available and usable.
Biodiversity Information Office
We’re establishing the Biodiversity Information Office (BIO). The BIO will provide a system to capture, store, curate, publish and analyse biodiversity data throughout WA. This will facilitate better up-front decision making, reduce cost, and result in better environmental assessments.
