Our changing policy environment and client base and the need to operate efficiently mean that we need resilient and adaptable long-term processes and systems as well as reliable data.

Strategies to achieve this objective:

• Ensure our regulatory infrastructure is reliable, resilient and able to be reused in response to policy change.
• Protect the integrity and utility of the core elements of our schemes, including greenhouse and energy data, contracts, units and certificates.

Operating environment

The environmental factors that will shape our capability development into the future include technological advances and social transformations. Government and private investment in emerging technologies continues to build momentum and will only increase the uptake of renewables and clean energy technologies to drive down costs and provide new opportunities for carbon abatement. We need to continue to look over the horizon to ensure we understand these changes to inform our regulatory postures and scheme administration.

Increasingly informed consumers can already make use of ‘smart’ technologies to take control of their energy consumption, production, use and costs. The Finkel review highlighted the importance of consumers in the transformation of the energy sector and calls for consumers to be incentivised for participating in demand response and distributed energy and storage alternatives. The growth of the ‘prosumer’ and increasingly distributed energy resources have seen business models in the energy industry transform rapidly. As a result, business models are out-pacing current legislation and regulatory frameworks and will require us to work closely with government, industry and clients to ensure schemes remain workable and relevant.

Beyond the opportunities to be realised from the changes in the energy sector, innovation from the ICT sector will provide us with new solutions to ensure we remain efficient and agile in our ICT operations and scheme administration. We will continue to draw on whole-of-government ICT initiatives, such as the government’s cloud computing policy and the Digital Transformation Agenda, to continuously improve our ICT capabilities for the enhancement of the user experience, to protect the security of our systems and data and to realise efficiencies.

While the increasing integration of ICT and energy markets will provide new opportunities such as real time data, the agency must also remain vigilant and responsive to a dynamic cyber security risk environment. Our agency continues to maintain and enhance a robust cyber security posture as a means of ensuring the integrity of our schemes, systems, data, units and certificates.

Priorities

Our priorities over the life of the plan are to:

Capability

As markets and business models evolve in response to technological and social advances, we must remain aware of future technologies and opportunities that are likely to be adopted by our clients so that we are prepared for changes as they occur. For our schemes, this may mean future legislative changes. It will require us to be forward thinking in the way we communicate and interact with our clients. It will mean we will need to remain adaptable and actively seek opportunities to leverage emerging and transformative technologies in line with client and industry adoption.

As well as keeping abreast of these changes, our focus must remain on ensuring clients are able to interact with us in a secure and reliable way. Strategic and transparent investment will allow us to continue to consolidate, enhance and integrate existing systems that are operated as part of current schemes. In doing this, we also recognise the need to ensure our core systems are easily adaptable and responsive to policy change or shifts in our schemes and regulatory frameworks.

In addition to ICT investment, the agency continues to invest in building the regulatory capability of our staff. We recognise that it’s not just our process and system developments, but the expertise and shared knowledge of our people that will drive improvements. As technological advances are adopted by our clients and interact with our schemes and markets, our ability to administer regulation through robust, repeatable processes and sound decision making will be supplemented with the need to understand new energy technologies, methods and policies.

To meet the agency’s current and future staffing needs we need to attract, retain and develop talented, qualified and diverse staff. Training and development opportunities, succession planning and talent management will be underpinned by capability development programs. To cement ourself as an employer of choice, we will continue to promote the value of health and wellbeing initiatives for agency staff and enhance our management capability to drive higher levels of organisational performance, culture and engagement. Supporting the agency to build resilience and adaptability will ensure that our staff are flexible, agile and able to effectively respond to the changing environment in which we operate.

Performance

To measure our performance against this objective we will consider activities related to the provision of ICT services, and report annually against the following key performance indicators.