Dominello to use his promotion to drive digitisation

Victor Dominello plans to use his ascension to the NSW government’s powerful expenditure review committee to “link data to money” and use the state's purse strings to compel agencies to prove they’re delivering on outcomes.

Victor Dominello addresses the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit.

Dominello secured a promotion to the Finance portfolio as well as a cabinet seat in premier Gladys Berejiklian’s January ministerial reshuffle.

At the Gartner Data Analytics summit in Sydney this morning, the self-proclaimed data advocate told the crowd he’d been lobbying for the job for at least six months.

“I said to Gladys ‘please please please can I be on Finance because I want to be on ERC [the expenditure review committee]’... I want to link data with money, because that is when we are going to get some really profound insight,” he said.

Dominello flagged the possibility of offering a cut of savings or an “innovation bonus” to agencies who can produce comprehensive datasets that point to successful policy delivery.

He said agencies on their own would only make “incremental improvements”.

“But the really deep improvements mean looking internally and then sharing data across the government’s silos. This will only happen when we say ‘show us some improvements and we’ll attach money to that’," he said.

Dominello also convinced Berejiklian to let him keep his digital duties - including custodianship of the state’s Data Analytics Centre - in the new portfolio, and said he plans to apply the same digital mantras to new domains like budget tracking and CTP insurance.

“If you love paper, do origami. But if you want to work in the 21st Century it’s really got to be digital,” he said.

He warned the insurance industry that it was next on this list to receive the price transparency treatment already doled out to fuel retailers through the Fuel Check real-time price comparison website.

Dominello indicated a “CTP Check” platform could be on the horizon.

“We are going to see really quickly where the insurance players are and how they are pricing the market," he said.

“Then as regulators we can say, you’re going too fast and riding these premiums too high. This is going to result in super profits and will drive the cost of premiums up. We’re not going to accept that.”

Fuel Check, which has been live since August last year, has already attracted interest from the Northern Territory government, which wants to roll the app out up north.

Dominello said there was nothing technical stopping the platform from going national today.

“Hopefully one day the feds will pick it up,” he said.