Qld Residential Tenancies Authority hunts for new CDO

Queensland’s rental sector regulator is looking to find a replacement chief digital officer after the departure of Greg Watts to the Public Trustee of Queensland earlier this year.

The Public Trustee appointed Watts as its CIO in July, replacing Shaun Francis who the Queensland Electoral Commission appointed as its executive director of digital technologies in May.

The Residential Tenancies Authority's (RTA’s) digital solutions director Jelena Nikolic, meanwhile, has stepped in as acting CDO while the authority looks for a permanent replacement for Watts, according to its website. 

The new CDO will report to the statutory agency’s CEO and lead its “digital transformation program”, which includes “migrating legacy platforms to Dynamics 365, focusing on user experience, efficiency, automation, data insights and customer experience,” according to the job posting.

More details of the transformation program are provided in the RTA’s Strategic Plan for 2022-26 [pdf].

In recent years, the Brisbane-headquartered authority has invested heavily in digital capabilities to reduce the effort required to provide services like bond management and dispute resolution for landlords, renters and real estate agents.  

The RTA’s Web Services suite was completed in late 2021 when the authority released its “Bulk Bond Lodgement” feature, which allows users to lodge multiple bonds and bond increases in a single online transaction. 

In the 2021-22 financial year, the RTA “saw a five percent increase in uptake across all RTA Web Services and 70.2 percent of all tenancy and bond forms were lodged through [its] digital channels,” according to its most recent annual report [pdf].

Watts had been the authority's CDO since 2021; prior to that he was the Queensland Department of Employment, Small Business and Training’s CIO and the Queensland Government Chief Information Office’s director executive of architecture consulting.

He has also held senior IT positions at the Public Safety Business Agency and the Queensland Police Service.