In a rapidly evolving environment, where all Australian government agencies work with an increasingly more distributed workforce, it is imperative to establish governance and planning arrangements that are fit-for-purpose.

In July 2020, the National Archives of Australia (NAA) released a report titled ‘Building Trust in the Public Record: managing information and data for government and community’. This has quickly become a seminal policy document for how Australian government agencies create, collect, manage and use information assets, and how they improve their information management.

This paper is based on the virtual event held on 8 December 2020, in partnership with Public Sector Network.

David Fricker, Director-General of the National Archives of Australia, explored the key requirements and actions emanating from that policy to further improve the management of government records, information and data. This paper also brings together the perspectives and data journeys of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) from several federal agencies, all of whom use and manage ever-growing amounts of information.