Discover the women and men who are advancing the use of data, inspiring their peers, and transforming organizations as we move towards a data-driven future.
Back to listingYvonne’s experience and expertise
Yvonne Lee is a senior leader with more than 20 years of experience across strategy, product, innovation, and digital technology. Throughout her career, she has led large-scale transformation initiatives that deliver practical, meaningful outcomes for customers, communities, and organisations. Known for her pragmatic, “can-do” approach, she combines strong leadership with the ability to navigate complex stakeholder environments and deliver results in fast-paced and challenging contexts.
A core pillar of Yvonne’s work is her deep commitment to customer experience. She champions data, digital capability, and service design practices that ensure solutions genuinely meet customer needs; prioritising usability, accessibility, transparency, and inclusive design principles. Her focus on accessibility spans digital, physical, and service environments, bringing together her understanding of the built environment and technology to drive better, more equitable customer outcomes.
Yvonne currently serves as the Open Data Lead for Brisbane City Council, where she is responsible for advancing the city’s open data strategy, strengthening governance and quality, and increasing the value and impact of publicly accessible data. She leads initiatives to modernise council’s data platforms, uplift data maturity, and expand the utility of the Brisbane Open Data Portal. Her work centres on enabling open, trusted, and user-friendly data that supports innovation across industry, academia, and the community, while ensuring accessibility and customer experience remain at the forefront.
Prior to joining Brisbane City Council, Yvonne served as Senior Manager for the Open Data and Innovation team at Transport for NSW. In that role, she led statewide programs to expand access to open data, improve data-sharing capability, and strengthen the NSW data ecosystem. She championed customer-centric and accessibility-focused approaches to data and digital services, contributing to greater transparency, innovation, and collaboration across government and industry.
Yvonne’s expertise spans strategy, program and product management, digital transformation, data governance, customer experience, accessibility, and stakeholder engagement. Across all her roles, she has driven data-informed decision-making and delivered solutions at scale that bring together people, technology, and design to create clear, measurable, community-focused impact.
A word from Yvonne
"My core belief as a data leader is that data is useless unless people can actually use it. If it’s locked in strange formats or too hard to interpret, it may as well not exist. I’m obsessed with user experience, so accessibility is non‑negotiable. If people can’t preview it, read it, and understand it, then we haven’t done our job. I also see open data as more than datasets... it’s open information. Raw data can be noise until it’s combined with other knowledge, but that’s not a reason to hold it back until it’s “perfect.” Someone out there will have the missing piece that makes it powerful. Data voids are inevitable, but something is almost always better than nothing. For me, sustainable impact is about using data and technology to make everyday life better for real people. One of the most rewarding moments in my career was during an innovation challenge where we used beacons and an app to support people with vision impairment. A user told us it was the first time she knew what shops she walked past every day on her commute through Chatswood Station. She’d made that journey for years; This was the first time she could experience it."
Yvonne’s inspirations
My inspirations
I engage with data consumers. They are the inspiration. In particular, recently, the communities around openstreetmap. They want to engage with government, they are willing to do the ‘work’ to get the data into a useful format — including the hard part — the metadata!
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