The sector the role sits in: state-owned water corporations, an economic regulator that runs on reported data, and a data-platform uplift that is moving utilities off spreadsheets and onto governed cloud analytics.
Victoria's urban water is delivered by state-owned water corporations constituted under the Water Act 1989 — three metropolitan retailers and Melbourne Water in the city, and a set of regional urban corporations across the rest of the state. Wannon Water is the second-largest of the regional corporations by service area, covering roughly 23,500 km² of south-west Victoria from the South Australian border across to Lismore.
The sector is economically regulated by the Essential Services Commission (ESC), which sets prices through multi-year determinations and holds corporations to published performance reporting. Water balances and resource data are reported to DEECA through the Victorian Water accounts. The practical effect is that a water corporation's data is not a back-office concern — it is the substance of regulatory compliance, asset planning, and customer outcomes all at once.
Across the sector, the data function is mid-stream on an uplift: moving from siloed operational, asset, spatial and billing systems toward governed, central analytics on Microsoft and Azure platforms. The role being advertised — building pipelines, models and reporting on Azure Data Factory, SQL and Power BI, and making the resulting assets trusted and reusable — is a direct expression of where the sector is heading.
| Layer | What it does | Where I sit |
|---|---|---|
| Azure Data Factory | Pipeline orchestration and data movement on Azure — the role's named tool | Built equivalent orchestration by hand at group scale (six ERPs) |
| SQL | Enterprise data platform and modelling layer | Native — source-side at enterprise scale |
| Power BI | Business intelligence, reporting and dashboards | Native — full enterprise business builds |
| Microsoft Fabric | Unified data platform consolidating the Microsoft estate | Adjacent — Power BI / Azure native ground |
| GIS (Esri) | Spatial and network asset data across the supply systems | Domain-adjacent — spatial and asset data |
| Asset Management | Infrastructure lifecycle, maintenance and capital planning | Domain-adjacent — planning and projection systems |
| SCADA / Telemetry | Operational sensor data from treatment and network | Domain-adjacent — operational data into reporting |
| Billing / CIS | Customer information and revenue systems | Domain-adjacent — finance / operations reporting |