Austrade relies on knowledge and information systems to advance Australia’s trade, investment, international education, and tourism interests. As a global organisation, it is critical that all information assets are available and accessible, any time, from any location, through a channel of choice, for both clients and Austrade staff.

Austrade’s digital and IT strategy sets out the vision for a trade and investment organisation that makes effective use of digital tools and agile work practices to meet the needs of our clients and staff. The strategy has three priorities:

• Better services for clients—offering digital services that are quick and easy to use and available where our clients do business.
• Better tools for staff—equipping Austrade’s global team with time-saving tools that are resilient to change and disruption, making it easier to work with clients and partners.
• Increased capability—building agency- wide digital and data skills so we can deliver services that meet the needs of our clients and partners in an agile way.

The strategy also sets out four enabling areas of work:

• strong data and information systems
• simpler and faster service delivery
• modern, cloud-based platforms
• secure and reliable systems.

To support this strategy, Austrade has delivered several digital services that enable exporters to determine which markets have the most potential for their business, and access insights about market trends in their industry. These services are available to all exporters (or intending exporters), not just existing Austrade clients.

A key component of supporting Austrade’s highly mobile workforce is ensuring seamless access to line-of-business applications and productivity tools that are resilient to change and disruption. The effectiveness of Austrade’s current technology service offering has been highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Austrade’s entire global footprint was able to rapidly transition to remote working with minimal disruption to services. This was achieved through a well-architected and considered rollout of technologies to support efficient, collaborative and transparent work styles as part of a broader strategy to digitise the workplace and move supporting applications to the cloud.

Austrade takes advantage of cloud hosting arrangements where applicable and uses a government-approved data centre for hosting on-premises systems. This environment provides flexibility to migrate appropriate workloads to the cloud in line with the Australian Government’s Secure Cloud Strategy.

In addition to the digital and IT strategy, Austrade has developed a data strategy, which is now out for consultation with key stakeholders. The data strategy is designed to mature our enterprise-wide data capability and strengthen operational, client and investor service delivery through evidence-based research. This strategy will provide the framework for a structured approach to data intelligence and will better position Austrade to target businesses and relationships, identify market opportunities and drive strategic priorities.

Austrade invests in agile, multidisciplinary teams to better support the effective delivery of digital products and services to our clients. These teams also support Austrade’s client service delivery model through continual improvement and personalisation of products and services. Austrade’s strategy will continue to adapt to an evolving and disruptive digital landscape to ensure our services respond to business needs.

Austrade continues to strengthen its digital workplace capabilities by investing in automation and digital workflows, cloud and mobility, cybersecurity and enhanced collaboration tools to support modern ways of working.

OUTLOOK FOR 2020–21—DIGITAL FIRST AND DATA DRIVEN

In 2020–21, Austrade will continue to deliver on our digital and IT strategy by scaling, strengthening and assessing our capabilities. This will ensure Austrade’s operations and services are seamless and responsive to change and disruption.

For clients, we will continue building on Austrade’s service offering by enhancing existing services, while also delivering new digital products for exporters (or intending exporters). Digital services will become increasingly omnichannel, providing personalisation at scale.

For staff, we will invest further in Austrade’s mobile technologies to ensure our teams can work efficiently, wherever they are and regardless of the external environment. We will increase our use of cloud services, refresh our internal systems, refine and implement a new strategy for collaboration and information sharing, and continue to transition from our legacy customer relationship management platform.