A tenant cannot choose which of our staff, contractors or systems hold their details, so we have to choose for them, field by field. I would rather a plumber telephone a coordinator than know why a household needs two workers at the door. The same discipline applies to the homes themselves: a condition score is only as good as the last time somebody actually looked.
Selected works
Decisions in context.
I
Cutting the contractor portal from forty-six tenant fields to eleven
In August 2021 a tenant in Logan told her housing officer that a plumber had mentioned her protection order while fixing a tap.
Notifying 1,326 people after one mailbox compromise, not the 214 our lawyers listed
In March 2023 a housing officer in our Rockhampton office entered her password on a convincing copy of our sign-in page, and an attacker read her mailbox for nineteen hours before our monitoring ended the session.
Walking through every home before buying software to predict its condition
In early 2024 the board was asked to approve a ten-year maintenance forecast of A$186 million that rested on condition surveys carried out in 2016 and 2017 and aged by formula ever since.
I judge a housing provider's systems by whether each part of a tenant's record reaches only the people who need it to keep that home safe and in repair.
I am Chief Information Officer of Wynnorra Community Housing, a Brisbane-based not-for-profit that manages 8,640 tenancies across south-east, central and north Queensland. We own 5,120 of those homes and manage the rest under leases from the state. Revenue was A$218 million in the year to 30 June 2026, almost all of it rent, rent assistance paid to tenants and government funding tied to the homes. I lead 41 technology and information colleagues, with an operating budget of A$13.6 million and A$5.8 million of capital in 2026–27. I report to the chief executive and to the board's Audit, Risk and Technology Committee every quarter.
I did not start in technology. In 1994 I took a tenancy officer's position at a small Townsville housing association because nobody in the city was hiring graduates in information systems. I collected rent, inspected homes and, because I could build a database, ended up keeping the association's records. That desk taught me what a tenant file contains: income, family members, health and sometimes the reason a woman has moved four hundred kilometres from a former partner. Since then I have worked for a software vendor, a maintenance contractor and two housing providers, and each one changed who could open that file.
The decisions on this site concern access and evidence rather than new products. I removed thirty-five tenant fields from our contractor portal and paid for the extra coordination it caused. I recommended telling every person whose correspondence sat in a compromised mailbox, not only those our lawyers considered at risk. And I argued for walking through every home to measure its condition before buying software that promised to predict it. Each choice cost money, time or goodwill that colleagues wanted to spend elsewhere.
Contractor logins cut from 1,940 to 1,180
Tenant fields visible to 212 maintenance firms fell from 46 to 11. First-visit access dropped from 91 to 86 per cent before recovering to 90, and three extra coordinators now cost A$260,000 a year.
1,326 people told about one compromised inbox
Housing officers telephoned 312 tenants with safety flags before any letter was posted. Notification and support cost A$410,000, against about A$150,000 for counsel's narrower list of 214.
8,412 homes resurveyed in thirty months
A physical survey replaced condition scores from 2016 and raised the ten-year maintenance forecast from A$186 million to A$238 million, a difference the board then had to fund.
Current focus
I am moving tenant documents out of email and shared drives into the housing record, with retention rules that delete what we no longer need, so that a future compromise of a single inbox exposes far less than the last one did.
Conversations I welcome
I would consider one non-executive role on a not-for-profit or regional infrastructure board, with about twenty days a year, once Wynnorra's chair and chief executive have agreed and potential conflicts have been reviewed.
The leadership record
Trusted with consequential decisions.
Formation
Bachelor of Business (Information Systems)Carrowmont University · 1993
Graduate Certificate in Information SecurityCarrowmont University · 2012
Louisa brings the committee the decision, the cost and the people affected on one page. When she wanted to notify everyone after the 2023 breach, she also showed us exactly what the narrower option would have saved.
Philippa DunsworthChair, Audit, Risk and Technology Committee, Wynnorra Community HousingThe full record ↗
Contact
I would consider one non-executive role on a not-for-profit or regional infrastructure board, with about twenty days a year, once Wynnorra's chair and chief executive have agreed and potential conflicts have been reviewed.
