Eleanor Dickinson

5 days ago | itnews.com.au | Eleanor Dickinson

Victoria’s inaugural whole-of-government technology leader Luke Halliday has departed after three years. Halliday joined Digital Victoria in 2022 as its chief technology officer and was tasked with modernising government services and leading IT transformation initiatives. In 2023, his role transitioned to the newly formed Department of Government Services (DGS), which absorbed many of Digital Victoria’s functions.

5 days ago | itnews.com.au | Eleanor Dickinson

The Western Australia Police Force will invest $30.8 million over four years in a wide-ranging ICT overhaul, as revealed in the 2025–26 WA State Budget. The initiative, dubbed the ICT Optimisation Program, will see an estimated $2.8 million spent in 2024–25 [pdf], with the remaining $28 million spread evenly over the subsequent four years. The program forms part of a broader digital transformation strategy aimed at modernising the agency’s technology environment.

5 days ago | itnews.com.au | Eleanor Dickinson

The Australian Red Cross is in the final stages of adopting a data mesh approach using Microsoft Fabric following a “false start” with a traditional centralised data lake model. The not-for-profit organisation began rolling out Microsoft Purview as its enterprise data platform during its multi-year transformation in 2023. However, it shifted course following the release of Microsoft Fabric later that year, aligning its strategy more closely with a data mesh approach.

1 week ago | itnews.com.au | Eleanor Dickinson

The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has signed a $70-million deal with Amazon Web Services, bringing the cloud provider’s renegotiated government-wide deal to around $364 million in total value. The new contract dwarfs the $6.3 million combined value of ASD’s previous 13 contracts with AWS, which date back to 2017, and come as AWS develops a Top Secret (TS) Cloud for ASD’s national security applications.

1 week ago | itnews.com.au | Eleanor Dickinson

Defence is ramping up efforts to “accelerate and enable” artificial intelligence adoption across the organisation, in part by tapping a data repository of around one billion unstructured documents. The department established an AI centre within its data division at the end of last year, which now has a dozen full-time employees focused on scaling AI across both Defence’s military platforms and corporate functions.