Build data interoperability

The Building trust in the public record policy recommends agencies assess their interoperability maturity based on business and stakeholder needs. This includes identifying interoperability maturity gaps and planning to address them (action 11).

The potential of your agency's information assets (records, information and data) to be shared and re-used depends on their quality, discoverability, and overarching management.

To achieve this potential, your agency needs to build interoperability across a range of themes – business, security, legal, semantic and technical.

Building interoperability means you can exchange information and data between different systems. It is dependent on clear, shared expectations for the context and meaning of data across systems.

Building interoperability

Data governance and management is the foundation for building interoperability. It supports standardisation and management to facilitate discoverability and sharing. It is an essential component of information governance, particularly in data-centric agencies.

To start learning about interoperability, read about:

Why interoperability?

Interoperability supports the use and reuse of government information and data as key assets and can:

  • provide consistent, coordinated and more timely services
  • improve accessibility
  • lessen the impact of structural changes in government
  • reduce the risks of technical obsolescence
  • inform policy development and decision-making
  • reduce the cost of information and data management through reuse and shared infrastructure.

Implementation advice

The following implementation advice helps build your agency's capability to meet the requirements of the Building trust in the public record policy. 

Requirement 2 – Implement fit-for-purpose information management processes, practices and systems

Implementation advice

Assess interoperability maturity based on business and stakeholder needs. Identify interoperability maturity gaps and plan to address them.

The Data Interoperability Maturity Model (DIMM) helps you assess your agency's progress towards data interoperability.

Interoperability key themes help you understand how interoperability is not just a technical fix. It also relies on working with your information and data to align your business, security, legal and semantic needs.

Interoperability development phases will help you plan and implement solutions to address interoperability hurdles that are visualised in the interoperability scenarios.

Your results from using the Business System Assessment Framework (BSAF) can be used to identify:

  • the need to integrate business systems or to migrate/export data to address risks or gaps
  • system functionality to meet your information and data needs over time
  • what information and data is held in your systems and its value.

Minimum metadata supports a standards-based approach to sharing information and data.

Interoperability initiatives

Interoperability initiatives are being led by a range of Australian Government agencies, including:

More information