CIO50 2023 #18 Kathryn King, eSafety

Name: Kathryn King
Title: Chief Information Officer & Head of Technology and Digital Branch
Company: eSafety Commissioner (eSafety)
Commenced role: June 2017
Reporting line: Chief Operating Officer
Member of the executive team: Yes
Technology Function: 45 staff, 6 direct reports

As Australia’s online safety regulator, it is vital for eSafety to have the technology capability to keep pace with the ever-changing harms reported to it and discovered through its research.

For the eSafety Commissioner’s CIO and Head of Technology and Digital Kathryn King this means ensuring that eSafety’s technology strategy and critical delivery programs enable its regulatory operations across a range of online harms, including child cyber bullying, adult cyber abuse, image-based abuse (or non-consensual sharing of intimate images), and illegal and harmful content including child sexual abuse material and violent extremism.

A major focus for King and the technology team over several years has been to ensure staff exposed to this challenging material are supported in several ways. “As a fundamental tenet of our strategy, our technical teams co-design products and services in tandem with business users such as investigators and educators,” King tells CIO Australia. “We address the need for our staff to experience repeat exposure to harmful material in the course of their work by implementing continual efficiencies and features such as image masking and process automations.”

A trusted source for online safety

This approach also works to ensure that the regulator’s public facing digital services are informed by its users through taking a user-centred design approach to product delivery.

“This helps ensure we continue to be a trusted source of online safety material and provide secure, easy to use reporting pathways to members of the public seeking help through the eSafety Commissioner’s regulatory powers,” says King.

The technology team and business units working collaboratively has resulted in eSafety’s investigations teams being able to scale and process more complaints effectively year-on-year, particularly as complaint volumes spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Investigators working alongside technology through established working groups and multi-disciplinary product teams allows us to continually prioritise which features are most important to them, ensuring the software we develop always adds business value and is fit for purpose,” says King.

Meanwhile, regulatory technology and digital product teams working in tandem also requires data teams to be aligned closely to deliver work plans as part of a three-year data strategy spanning people, process, and technology streams. This has positioned King’s technology team as an educator and business leader, helping deliver data solutions and support staff capability in data storytelling, analytics, governance, and management. The benefits of this work include improving the organisation’s ability to use data in meaningful ways and continuing to mature the organisation as a data-driven regulator.

Improved mental health and wellbeing.

Using automation and other features to enable efficiencies and reduce unnecessary repeat exposure to harmful material has helped safeguard the mental health and wellbeing of investigators. In one case a lengthy manual task was reduced to a single click by automating and processing information sharing through an API, resulting in hundreds of hours saved each year, King notes.

To achieve this King has fostered an internal technical capability aligned with eSafety’s regulatory operations to deliver on multiple programs of work. “Through strategic management of these programs, I have built teams from the ground up across software engineering, product management, data, architecture and PMO”. Building a bespoke technology capability which can keep pace with changing business needs and new requirements has a key challenge, however. “Due to the growth of the organisation over the last several years and the area we regulate constantly changing we have needed to optimise and maintain the technologies we have while also exploring new innovations and enabling capabilities to support additional regulatory schemes and online harms,” King says.

These two bodies of work – the traditional and the more agile – eventually coalesced under King’s leadership as the organisation has grown in maturity and ability to respond faster to the ongoing state of flux and emerging issues in the online space.

“Through our regulatory technology solutions and co-design approach, we have ensured eSafety can deliver on its core remit and expanded legislative schemes to be seen as a global leader in online safety regulation,” says King.

Louis van Wyk