Company leaders that are putting technology at the centre of their outlook, capabilities, and leadership mandate are leading the race when it comes to future-proofing their business.

Digital transformation ranked in the top five highest priorities of local government leaders in a post-COVID environment, according to Davidson’s 2022 Australian Local Government Index.

Davidson’s Managing Partner of Search and Advisory, Clare McCartin, recently facilitated the 2022 Australian Local Government CEO Index Virtual Forum. The panel delved into the index’s findings, while also hearing from metropolitan and regional CEOs about their own experiences.

Ms McCartin said local governments held vast amounts of personal data, which was why they were a major target for cybercriminals.

“Australia’s Cyber Security Centre reported that Commonwealth, state, territory and local government accounted for 35 per cent of incidents in the year ending June 2021. That’s a significant number,” she said.

“Robust and secure digital solutions have become more important after COVID, not just to connect citizens to services, but to shore up community resilience.”

There’s no question that the pandemic has increased the pace of business and technology capabilities will be critical to companies’ COVID exit strategies as well as to what comes next.

After seeing how the pandemic had sped up the adoption of digital technologies by several years, the forum panel explored how companies were rethinking the role of digital technology in their overall business strategy.

Ms McCartin invited Noosa Council CEO Scott Waters to share why he thought digital transformation had become such a key priority for leaders.

“First and foremost, our systems, our resilience, it’s the backbone of what we deliver to our communities,” he said.

 “Once we then start to move through that process of delivering services, we then have that ability to be able to branch out and deliver the digital transformation that's required, not just within our councils, but throughout our community.

“As we become more robust in what we deliver to our community, that trust, and that resilience is then built, and that continues to be able to move forward.” Mr Waters said it didn’t matter what type of local government – all councils were the cornerstone of everything that was delivered within a community.

“The trust we instill within our community really comes back to our digital resilience nowadays. Gone are the days of the roads, rates, and rubbish. We know we are so much more than that.

“We instill the trust the community requires to be able to function on their day-to-day basis. It helps us to not only deliver those core services but then branch out into further services into the future.”

The key message Mr Waters had was the journey was “never ending”.

“Our digital transformation journey is not ending. It will continue. And the more we can invest into digital that provides better services to our community, the more opportunity we have to be able to invest into frontline services.

“So, where that back office starts to be able to get more simplified through artificial intelligence and the utilisation of more robust systems and services, the frontline delivery, that person-to-person contact is really, coming out of COVID, what our community is yearning for.

“So, it's extremely important for us for the future to invest in cyber, ensure we have that ability to be able to start to take forward the way that we will work with our community for the future.”

City of Marion CEO Tony Harrison also knows first-hand the challenges of rolling out a multimillion-dollar digital transformation program.

“It was a lot of work to get the program off the ground, going to elected members, and putting a very robust business case forward to secure millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars, is fairly challenging in any environment,” he said.

“It's not the part you really see a lot of value for money necessarily, but it's an essential part in the reform of big organisations.”

Ms McCartin asked Mr Harrison how they were navigating cyber security within their digital transformation program.

“When it comes to cybersecurity, one of the real benefits for us has been that we've been able to transform our approach both culturally in the organisation as well as in the physical build of the new system from the ground up as we've been implementing the digital transformation,” he said.

“We identified one of the key reforms was digital literacy and cybersecurity. That fundamentally underpinned all the physical transformations throughout the whole organisation.

“And I think because of the timing of the digital transformation project and bringing digital literacy and cyber awareness into that process as one of our fundamental principles, we’ve been able to move the organisation along really well.”

To download a copy of the 2022 Local Government CEO Index, click here.