Published on the 19/03/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
The boards of Australia’s leading organisations are ill prepared for the second tsunami of technological change according to Stephen Burdon, a leading management professor…
Burdon, who himself holds a number of non-executive directorships, is professor of management and technology at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Speaking at a round table event in Sydney organised by software company and Salesforce rival, Pegasystems, Burdon said that he had been working with the Australian Institute of Company Directors and was “convinced boards are not ready for this,” with Telstra chairman Catherine Livingstone being singled out as an exception.
“Boards are full of legal and finance people. They need to include people who understand technology,” said Burdon.
There are some signals of change. Earlier this month Commonwealth Bank appointed Wendy Stops to its board. Stops was a formerly an Accenture managing director with an IT consulting specialty. NAB meanwhile has former SAP CEO Geraldine McBride on its board. They, however, remain the exceptions.
Burdon said that Australia was on the “cusp of a second tsunami of change in the digital age” – the first being the commercialisation of the web. This second wave of change would be driven by an “intelligent software revolution” coupled with the “accelerating rate of development of artificial intelligence”.
This, he said, had already impacted the media, but education, banks and telecommunications companies were now undergoing massive change. But to succeed they needed “digital and physical platforms to optimise agility and creativity as the pace of change gets faster”.
Pegasystems offers one such platform, and uses visual tools to allow business people working with IT professionals to quickly develop solutions targetting emerging business issues. StudyGroup, which provides – either directly or in partnership with educational institutions including universities – a range of courses for students from 130 different countries, is currently piloting a new global admissions system on the cloud-based Pega 7 platform. While StudyGroup uses Salesforce as its corporate CRM, David Reeve, chief information and technology officer of StudyGroup, selected Pega 7 for its ability to scale and remove friction from the admissions process, by matching the courses that are on offer with student expectations and needs.
StudyGroup’s intent is to deliver courses to students that will ensure their success. “It’s a very simple business process with very complex rules,” says Reeve.
However he acknowledged that “transformation is hard for organisations, change is hard for organisations, change that’s transformative is even harder”.
“How we then go about transformation has been very slow paced.”
Burdon warned that business could not, however, afford to delay. He referred to the Harvard Business Review report into the Digital Evolution Index, published last month, which warned that Australia was now “stalling” in terms of its digital evolution.
The HBR authors warned that: “The only way they can jump-start their recovery is to follow what Stand Out countries do best: redouble on innovation and continue to seek markets beyond domestic borders.”
But without support from the boardroom that message risks going unheeded.
