Week 95

  • Sydney’s gone into full lockdown for the second time. So, for at least the next two weeks, no trips to Canberra, and I’m dusting off Animal Crossing like it’s March 2020 all over again.

  • The highlight this week was our Export Readiness team showcasing a live demo of our private beta to our executive, before we launch it on the 30th June. The team walked through each step in the new service, just like our invited beta participants will do in lodging a request to add or remove people from their registered export establishments. The feedback was really positive.

  • Hot on the heels for the 30th June are the Export Intelligence team, who are also on the final stretch for a private beta next week. The beta is starting by showing meat processors the hygiene performance of their own plants, which we collect through the MEDC initiative.

  • Lots of last-minute wrangling of dependencies, particularly with getting our application deployment pipelines ready for production. This is a big deal because getting our first private betas into production is creating standard and repeatable processes for everything else that’s going to come.

  • I gave a couple of talks on our digital strategy and forthcoming products to two audiences this week. The first was an update to our cohort of EL2 Directors across the Agricultural Trade Group, who are closest to our policy and operations across many different commodity areas.

    The second talk was with the Meat Modernisation Working Group — a joint industry-government forum set up to shape the ongoing reforms to meat exports. Last year, the Australian Meat Processor Corporation proposed a digital transformation roadmap for government and industry, and it was great to see a plenty of alignment between what’s on the industry roadmap and what’s on ours.

  • In the NSW state budget this week, it was good to see the Digital Restart Fund receive a top-up of $500 million, which takes the total amount in the fund to $2.2 billion.

Here’s the sunrise from my flight to Canberra on Tuesday morning, which will likely be my last flight for a short while: