Eleven Stories, One Thread: What This Year's Data Impact Winners Taught Us
Every year, we gather Qlik's ANZ community for one evening to celebrate and hand out trophies to the organisations doing the most interesting things with their data.
But if you actually sit with the eleven stories behind this year's Data Impact Awards, the trophies start to feel like the least interesting part.
What you're really looking at is eleven different answers to the same question: what happens when an organisation stops treating data as a reporting exercise and starts treating it as infrastructure for better decisions?
Here's what stood out.
Modernising from the inside out
Some of the most impressive work this year didn't happen in flashy new dashboards. It happened underneath them, in the plumbing most customers never see.
Bendigo & Adelaide Bank carries 170 years of history, which also means 170 years of legacy systems. Using Qlik Replicate, the bank has spent the last stretch turning a fragmented data landscape into a simplified, cloud-enabled environment, with new data pipelines now estimated to move ten times faster than the traditional approach. That's not a cosmetic upgrade. It's a foundation for faster fraud detection, stronger regulatory response, and whatever comes next in cloud and AI.
Accenture, working with a Federal Government agency, took on a similarly unglamorous but critical challenge: unlocking data that had been sitting in legacy mainframe systems for years. Real-time replication got that data moving again, cutting costs, improving accessibility, and quietly making an entire agency more capable of fast, informed decisions.
And AustRoads reminded us what “public impact” actually looks like at scale. Through NEVDIS, they run the single trusted national exchange for vehicle, registration, and driver licence data across every Australian state and territory, processing hundreds of millions of transactions a year to help fight registration fraud, distribute safety recalls, and verify identity. It's the kind of infrastructure most people never think about, doing work that touches almost everyone.
Putting insight in the hands of the people who act on it
The best analytics story isn't about how much data an organisation has. It's about who gets to use it, and how fast.
Dusk Australasia built a genuine self-service culture, from executives down to shop-floor teams, where every store can see consistent, trusted insight, including foot-traffic data layered against sales performance, so teams can understand conversion and act on it the same day. What made this one stick with us: it wasn't built for users, it was built with them, shaped through workshops and ongoing feedback rather than handed down as a finished product.
Doctors' Health Fund - Avant took a longer view of the same idea. Over eleven years, they've quietly built a governed hub of 30 Qlik applications spanning seven functional areas, giving everyone from frontline staff to executives a shared, trusted source of truth. Eleven years is the part worth sitting with. This isn't a project. It's a habit the organisation built into how it works.
Transport Accident Commission Victoria showed that modernisation isn't just a technology story either. It's an adoption story. Their move to a modern, cloud-based platform delivered centralised, trusted views for executives and operational teams alike, and in just four months, that translated into more than 200 users and 2,800 sessions. Good tools that nobody opens don't count. This one got opened.
Data with a mission
A few stories this year were less about internal efficiency and more about a broader responsibility.
Grampians Health, serving rural and regional Victoria, tackled a challenge a lot of regional health services know well: doing more with less. They combined timely, interactive Emergency Department reporting with a clear roadmap toward governed, scalable analytics, helping clinical and operational teams make better calls today while building toward something more durable.
SBS brought together 30 to 40 disparate data sources and billions of records into a single trusted, governed cloud environment, and then put that foundation to work shaping decisions on audience growth, content strategy, and advertising performance. What's notable is that it isn't finished. SBS is still investing, still extending governance and real-time capability, treating transformation as ongoing rather than a box to tick.
What agentic analytics actually looks like in practice
We talk a lot internally about the shift from dashboards that tell you what happened to systems that help you decide what to do next. This year, we got to see two organisations actually living that shift.
HSK Ward Group used MCP-driven prompting alongside Qlik Cloud Analytics to build an unusually polished, intuitive analytics experience, layered on top of a strong base of trusted insight across finance, procurement, inventory, and supply chain. It's a good early answer to a question a lot of organisations are only just starting to ask: what does it look like when AI genuinely changes how people interact with their data, not just how it's displayed?
AgProcure went further still, treating Qlik less as a set of tools and more as a platform, bringing together Qlik Cloud Analytics, Application Automation, writeback, Qlik Answers, MCP, and emerging AI capabilities, with a roadmap reaching into technology alliances like Snowflake. The result: years of spreadsheet-driven process replaced with governed, automated analytics, and a scalable model for customer reporting that keeps getting more accessible as natural language capabilities mature.
Behind every one of these stories, a person
Technology doesn't transform anything by itself. Someone has to push for it, defend it in budget meetings, and keep believing in it when the early results are unglamorous.
This year, that person was Brett Mesley from ANZ Bank, recognised not for a single project, but for the harder, less visible work of building confidence and data literacy across an organisation, and inspiring the people around him to keep going.
The thread running through all of it
Look across these eleven stories and a pattern emerges: none of them are really about Qlik. They're about organisations that decided their data deserved better than being an afterthought, and then did the unglamorous work of making that true.
Some of it was architectural. Some of it was cultural. All of it took longer than a quarter, and none of it happened because someone bought a license and waited.
Congratulations to every winner, and to everyone whose story didn't make the stage this year, the work is the point, not the trophy.
We're looking forward to seeing where all of you take it next.