DPIE Water - Smart Groundwater Platform Specification
Vendor-agnostic tender specification for NSW's groundwater data platform
Developed a comprehensive, vendor and technology-agnostic groundwater platform specification for the NSW Department of Primary Industry and Environment (DPIE) Water - delivered on behalf of ADASA - to underpin a market tender for a new system to manage, visualise, and analyse groundwater and licensing data across NSW.
The Challenge
DPIE Water's hydrogeology and assessment teams relied on groundwater, surface water, licensing, and climate data spread across multiple databases maintained by WaterNSW and other agencies. Manual data assembly was time-consuming, data access was fragmented, and there was no consolidated platform for analysis, reporting, or regulatory advisory. A rigorous, vendor-agnostic specification was needed to go to market for a fit-for-purpose groundwater platform.
Our Approach
- ✓Applied a structured methodology to derive a comprehensive groundwater platform specification aligned to DPIE Water's hydrogeological assessment and regulatory advisory workflows
- ✓Defined the business problem and outcomes required - including clean curated data, simplified access, consolidated views, and flexible filtering for groundwater analysis
- ✓Developed a vendor and technology-agnostic capability model covering all key platform capabilities: data aggregation, quality verification, visualisation, calculations, reporting, and third-party data export
- ✓Documented non-functional requirements covering performance, security, scalability, and interoperability to guide vendor responses
- ✓Structured the specification to maximise market innovation - enabling vendors to propose diverse technology solutions rather than prescribing a fixed architecture
- ✓Aligned the specification to the needs of WaterNSW (data custodian), DPIE Hydrogeologists (assessors), and NRAR (regulator) as key stakeholders
Results
- →Comprehensive groundwater platform specification delivered - providing DPIE Water with a rigorous, defensible basis for going to market via RFT
- →Vendor-agnostic capability model maximised innovation potential in market responses, avoiding lock-in to any single technology approach
- →Business outcomes clearly defined: clean curated data, simplified access, consolidated multi-source aggregation, flexible reporting, and third-party software integration
- →Specification aligned across three agencies - DPIE, WaterNSW, and NRAR - ensuring regulatory, custodianship, and advisory needs were all addressed
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