Community as the Catalyst in Southern Grampians, with Russell Bennett

Hi #smartcommunity friends! In this episode of the Smart Community Podcast I have a wonderful conversation with Russell Bennett. Russell has been the Manager of Business Systems at Southern Grampians Shire Council since April 2015. Prior to his current role he has 13+ years’ experience working as IT Project Manager and Business Analyst across a number of industries both in the private and public sector. In this episode Russell tells us about his background in business, IT and Project Management, what sparked his interest in the Smart Communities space, and what has driven the Southern Grampians Shire’s Smart Community approach. Russell then talks about the Digital Innovation and Smart Agriculture (DISA) festival the council has started to help educate the community, before he takes us through some use cases for the use of LoRaWAN and IoT in Southern Grampians. We then discuss the importance of embedding data into our decision making and educating the community about the use of data, as well as the importance of embedding the Smart Community approach across our organisations, and Russell tells us about his favourite project he has been working on. We finish our chat discussing the emerging trends of leveraging data to improve emergency services decision making. As always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it!

Find the full show notes at: www.mysmart.community

Connect with Russell via LinkedIn or via email: Rbennett@sthgrampians.Vic.gov.au

Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community

Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube

The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital