A feasibility assessment of the Australian Fisheries Management Authority’s data strategy

We partnered with the Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA) to improve its data management capability to support the agency’s mission of securing Australia’s sustainable fishing future.

The Challenge

AFMA is the Australian Government agency responsible for the efficient management and sustainable use of Commonwealth fish resources. AFMA relies on the ability to create, collect, and use data to enable its role in fisheries management. The need and production of fisheries data from various sources such as government, industry, research, and sea-product supply chains have increased. This offers new insights and opportunities for the agency to make informed decisions. However, data has been traditionally viewed as a technology project aspect rather than a reusable asset, leading to duplication of data, overlapping processing, and little awareness of work duplication in individual projects.

We worked with AFMA to conduct a feasibility assessment to understand the benefits of designing and implementing a data strategy. The vision of the data strategy is to improve AFMA’s data management capability to support the agency’s mission of securing Australia’s fishing future.

The Approach

Design research uncovered several key challenges pertaining to AFMA’s data management capability. These challenges included: little understanding of data needs; poor visibility across agency data; inconsistent data quality; siloed data; legacy data integration and usability; no centralised data governance; ineffective training; and, capability planning. Detailed personas were developed to articulate the voice of the business areas that we engaged. This human-centric analysis identified common themes, insights, and opportunity areas to improve the agency’s data management capability. Outputs were developed utilising co-design techniques, allowing for further review by stakeholders, empowering agency voices and ensuring accuracy.

The Outcome

Research findings identified the need to improve all aspects of the data lifecycle, including data creation, collection, storage, analysis, and reporting. These insights have been categorised into themes that are further decomposed into opportunity areas that AFMA’s data strategy must answer to provide measurable business benefits. The opportunity areas capture the overarching data management needs and the corresponding business benefits allowing AFMA to frame what a data strategy must address.

The recommended data strategy was designed in alignment with AFMA’s overarching business objectives while providing pragmatic guidance on the roles of technology, processes, skills, and leadership required to uplift the agency’s data management needs. The data strategy established common methods, practices, tools, and processes to manage, manipulate and share data within and outside of the organisation in a consistent manner while providing flexibility to those business areas with unique needs.