LEAD WITH DATA Podcast

Guest: Noel Toal, Chief Technology and Transformation Officer of Repurpose It
Noel joins Rina to unpack how he rebuilt trust in data at Repurpose It, an industrial resource recovery business where data and analytics can easily sit low on the agenda. He shares how he pulled over 70 dashboards down to just five, the mindset shift that changed how his board engaged with technology, how he won over his toughest sceptic and how the business is beginning to explore what AI can do for its operations.
Key points:
Industrial businesses often deprioritise data, even when the opportunity is significant
Over 70 dashboards were consolidated down to five, rebuilding trust in the process
Presenting strategy in business terms rather than technical terms changes how a board engages
The most resistant executive in the room can become your strongest advocate
Early signs of AI adoption are starting to shape how the business operates

Takeaway: In an industrial setting where data rarely gets top billing, the businesses that get board buy-in are the ones that translate technology into outcomes the board already cares about.

I sit down with Natalie Hogan who shares how her organisation moved governance off the page and into daily practice by using AI to rebuild it. Static policies became a living, chunked knowledge base that both people and AI agents could read, query and act on, closing the long-standing gap between governance written down and governance actually followed.
Key points:
Traditional governance was static, siloed and hard to embed; AI governance needed its own rule book from scratch
Policy as code: breaking frameworks into knowledge chunks that both humans and AI can read and update
Enterprise wide model governance, an agent governance framework and an AI risk management framework were introduced to cover the gap
Agents are now treated as part of a "silicon workforce," each with an owner, access level and place in a register
Early approach built siloed agents for each governance function before the team realised they needed one connected knowledge base instead
Advice for teams starting out: take a risk based approach, don't wait for every foundation to be perfect, and keep humans in the loop throughout

Takeaway: Governance only works once it's embedded in the flow of daily work rather than sitting in a document. This team's shift was to stop treating it as a series of automations and start treating it as one connected system that AI could help run. Tune to learn how!

Healthcare has some of the highest ambition and the tightest funding for AI of any sector. In this episode Lachlan MacBean walks through how his team built a ten person AI capability without a dedicated AI budget, the partnering model that made it possible, and why they made the call to shut down an early project despite strong results.
Key discussion points
Joining three months before COVID and the operational chaos that followed, and how the crisis proved the value of the analytics function
The partnering strategy: using clinicians' grant funding and dual academic clinical roles to fund AI work that wouldn't otherwise get a business case
Structuring the team on a part revenue target model, operating internally like a consulting practice within the hospital
A handful of models now running in production, built on a mix of structured data and clinical notes
Why an early AI project got strong results but was shut down: a solution looking for a problem, and a pricing model that made it commercially unsustainable at the time
The "shark tank" process now used to pressure test new ideas before committing delivery resources
Keeping teams engaged through all hands meetings, a cross organisation community of practice, and tying work back to patient impact

Moneyball for Golf: How a Lean Team Can Punch Above Its Weight
Lead with Data, with Jarred, Head of Data and Intelligence at Golf Australia
Most data leaders inherit a mandate from the board, a budget and teams they control. Jarred has none of that in the traditional sense. He runs the data function for a national sporting body, which means the data he works with is created by clubs and third parties he doesn't control, the team is lean and the budget is nowhere near enterprise scale. He still built one of the most strategically mature data capabilities in Australian sport.
This one is for you whether you lead a data function on tight constraints, or you just want to know how data is quietly reshaping the game.
What we get into:
Why owning your data end to end matters more than the shiny front end, and why the most important work happened under the hood
Migrating 25 years of legacy data with almost no documentation and what that actually takes
How Golf Australia moved from subjective, intuition led athlete decisions to models built on a decade of historical outcomes
Running a serious data capability with a lean team
The half a million handicaps behind one of the most personal datasets in the country

If you have ever argued about your handicap, that is Jarred's data.
Find Jarred on LinkedIn, where he is happy to chat about any of this.

Data governance has stopped being about rules and started being about survival. In this episode, Belinda walks through how her team shifted from gatekeeper to guide pairing technical and business minds, educating instead of enforcing, and learning to say no to perfection. We talk about what actually works when you're moving at speed, how AI forced organisations to finally care about data quality and the honest part nobody mentions: what it feels like to be seen as the insurance policy nobody wants to buy.