Gov upgrades data capabilities for its property register

The Department of Finance has invested in new cloud-based data warehouse and reporting services to enhance its oversight of the utilisation of Commonwealth-leased property and owned land.

An "Azure-based data landing zone", designed and built by Playtime Solutions, was implemented for the Australian Government Property Register (AGPR).

On the backend, the landing zone comprises Azure Data Lake, big data analytics service Azure Synapse, and Power BI for data visualisation.

It is designed to bring together multiple datasets - current, historical and third-party - in order to inform property-related decision-making.

iTnews understands that annual reporting on the status of Commonwealth office space had been impacted by existing data collection, validation and reporting processes tied to the AGPR, driving the business case to upgrade.

The AGPR was first implemented as a web-based application in 2016 [pdf], with Playtime Solutions appointed as the system administrator in 2020 for a four-year period. Playtime also won a $1.5 million contract in January 2023 to carry out system enhancements.

According to Playtime Solutions, the new data platform uses event-driven batch pipelines that have replaced previous collection and ingestion methods. 

The data warehouse and reporting system officially went live in early 2024.