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OpenGov speaks to Geoff Williams, Australian Department of Human Services

OpenGov speaks to Geoff Williams

With proper preparedness skills, one may be able to swiftly manage a dire situation with grace.

OpenGov spoke to Mr. Geoff Williams, Director of Business Continuity Practice at the Australian Department of Human Services, on the very topic of business continuity.

The Department of Human Services is the largest commonwealth agency on Australia with about 34,000 public sector employees. Geoff Williams has been a manager and a consumer of business continuity since the late 1990s.

Mr. Williams has been through the advent of Y2K and is a survivor of the great swine flu scare of 2009. He has managed various ICT projects and business as usual services in the private and public sectors. He also manages a Business Continuity validation and exercise program.

Mr. Williams’ focus for the next few years involves working on the rolling 12 month programs, which follows the 6 common practices in the BC lifecycle. His team provides incident response exercises for regional areas and division level exercises for Canberra. They are currently in the middle of the second round of business impact analyses and the supporting Business Continuity plans.

Mr. Williams finds that in dealing with an emergency situation, one must take a principles-based approach.

“You need to put together a decision making framework while remembering the key priorities of your business. These agreed priorities to make sure you do not lose sight of strategic direction. The executives that are in charge of monitoring that response, stay at the appropriate strategic level. This helps you focus on what is really important to the department and helps you manage the media,” Mr Williams told us.

“This helps people get a bigger picture of what they are looking at, what the business is there to do in the first place, may slip their mind,” Mr. Williams said, “In the event of a crisis, someone might be living too much in the moment. This will lead them to forget about how life must move on from such an event.”

Specific abilities required to work in the realm of business continuity, as Mr. Williams describes, “Includes an analytical and inquiring mind, attention to detail, and some genuine life experience. Someone in this field needs to know what is at risk, and what is not. People who can think for themselves and put matters into context will respond appropriately. They must keep calm and prioritize.”

These skills are imperative to have while dealing with a major crisis. Being able to pause and concentrate on the bigger picture, allows the individual to better assess the situation.

Mr. Williams is proud of the team he works with at the Department of Human Services. He believes that they help facilitate a healthy atmosphere. He said, “We have a very effective team in Business Continuity. Our people are very passionate, and it makes for a good environment.”

Mr. Williams hopes his Business Continuity team can improve organisational resilience. Thus, helping people think independently rather than rely on central planning agency in the aftermath of a crisis.

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Qlik’s vision is a data-literate world, where everyone can use data and analytics to improve decision-making and solve their most challenging problems. A private company, Qlik offers real-time data integration and analytics solutions, powered by Qlik Cloud, to close the gaps between data, insights and action. By transforming data into Active Intelligence, businesses can drive better decisions, improve revenue and profitability, and optimize customer relationships. Qlik serves more than 38,000 active customers in over 100 countries.

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CTC Global Singapore, a premier end-to-end IT solutions provider, is a fully owned subsidiary of ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC) and ITOCHU Corporation.

Since 1972, CTC has established itself as one of the country’s top IT solutions providers. With 50 years of experience, headed by an experienced management team and staffed by over 200 qualified IT professionals, we support organizations with integrated IT solutions expertise in Autonomous IT, Cyber Security, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure, Workplace Modernization and Professional Services.

Well-known for our strengths in system integration and consultation, CTC Global proves to be the preferred IT outsourcing destination for organizations all over Singapore today.

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Planview has one mission: to build the future of connected work. Our solutions enable organizations to connect the business from ideas to impact, empowering companies to accelerate the achievement of what matters most. Planview’s full spectrum of Portfolio Management and Work Management solutions creates an organizational focus on the strategic outcomes that matter and empowers teams to deliver their best work, no matter how they work. The comprehensive Planview platform and enterprise success model enables customers to deliver innovative, competitive products, services, and customer experiences. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with locations around the world, Planview has more than 1,300 employees supporting 4,500 customers and 2.6 million users worldwide. For more information, visit www.planview.com.

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SIRIM is a premier industrial research and technology organisation in Malaysia, wholly-owned by the Minister​ of Finance Incorporated. With over forty years of experience and expertise, SIRIM is mandated as the machinery for research and technology development, and the national champion of quality. SIRIM has always played a major role in the development of the country’s private sector. By tapping into our expertise and knowledge base, we focus on developing new technologies and improvements in the manufacturing, technology and services sectors. We nurture Small Medium Enterprises (SME) growth with solutions for technology penetration and upgrading, making it an ideal technology partner for SMEs.

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HashiCorp provides infrastructure automation software for multi-cloud environments, enabling enterprises to unlock a common cloud operating model to provision, secure, connect, and run any application on any infrastructure. HashiCorp tools allow organizations to deliver applications faster by helping enterprises transition from manual processes and ITIL practices to self-service automation and DevOps practices. 

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IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Nearly 3,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

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