Strategy & Transformation

Flourishing in the modern marketplace relies on an organisation’s ability to make the right choices.

To avoid being left behind in an evolving world it is critical for organisations to jump at opportunities for transformational growth. However, acting without sufficient planning is fraught with risk.

Transformation can only happen when an organisation is aligned on its strategic intent, and IT leaders need the resources to drive great choice-making across their organisation.

From planning to delivery, IBRS can cut through the confusion and guide your organisation all the way through its transformational journey. Our advisors have first-hand experience delivering digital transformation projects and can develop a tailored roadmap to deliver the outcomes you want.

Conclusion: Chatbots are a valuable addition to any organisation’s customer service strategy, and are an essential part of the toolkit that should support your organisation’s high-tech, high-touch approach to increasing customer satisfaction.

Details: Joseph Sweeney; 09 December 2021

IBRSiQ is a database of client inquiries and is designed to get you talking to our advisors about these topics in the context of your organisation in order to provide tailored advice for your needs.

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 16 November 2021

The Latest

16 November 2021: BlackLine launched its new accounts receivable (AR) tool, which it claims is the first unified platform for end-to-end cash flow optimisation in the industry. The software features intelligent optical character recognition (OCR) to eliminate manual work and reduce process errors. It also allows the predictability of customer payments when building cash flow forecasts.

Why it’s Important

More organisations are adopting e-invoicing to take advantage of automation features, reduced printing costs, shorter payment delays and faster delivery times. As noted in our previous advisory The ERP: A critical IT application for the business, more Australian organisations are joining the trend of transforming their finance processes by replacing their ERP finance systems with a scalable Cloud-based ERP system that offers seamless integration to other business applications and streamlines backend business processes.

Recently, IBRS conducted a study into the economics of ERP and Cloud solutions to find out the best ROI on their tech investments. A common answer among mid-size organisations and government agencies is the value of financial automation in relation to labour hours. On average, they reported productivity savings of between 0.5 and 3 full-time equivalent (FTE) roles when they switched to e-invoicing. Interestingly, the same benefit was cited by respondents in our 2019-2020 study on local governments in the country.

There are challenges to e-invoicing adoption, however. Apart from the perceived complexity and difficulty of most organisations in getting up to speed in their transition, employees worry about the threat of being made redundant in the near future.

IBRS discovered, however, that senior leadership teams transfer employees impacted by the reduction in labour hours to other roles where their skills are applicable. Organisations that go down this path gain more control in carefully managing their employee concerns. E-invoicing has become a foundational solution for better process management to establish digital relationships with their partners and internal staff.

Who’s impacted

What’s Next?

Before upgrading the financial platform, review the context of your current organisational and ICT strategy. Consider how the platform supports full ‘end-to-end’ processes that are integrated with other business software systems so that appropriate touchpoints are captured and understood. By doing so, the platform can meet its expected impact on your financial metrics and process requirements.

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 12 November 2021

The Latest

09 November 2021: Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the availability of Babelfish for Amazon Aurora. Babelfish enables its hyperscale Aurora relational database service to understand Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL commands. This allows customers to run applications written for Microsoft SQL Server directly on Amazon Aurora with minimal modifications in the code.

Why it’s Important.

This new feature in Amazon Aurora, means enterprises with legacy applications can migrate to the Cloud without the time, effort and huge costs involved in rewriting application codes. In addition, using Babelfish benefits organisations through:

Reduced migration costs and no expensive lock-in licensing terms, unlike in commercial-grade databases
No interruption in existing Microsoft SQL Server database use since Babelfish can handle the TDS network protocol
Availability of the open-source version of Babelfish for PostgreSQL on GitHub under the permissive Apache 2.0 and PostgreSQL licenses

Who’s impacted

CIO
Development team leads
Business analysts

What’s Next?

More general availability of hyperscale Cloud computing to support scalability and high-performance needs is expected in the coming months from major vendors. The most successful ones will require minimal changes in enterprises' existing SQL Server application code, speed of migration, and ease of switching to other tools post-migration.

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 08 November 2021

Conclusion: Don’t leave Cloud skills benchmarking to chance. Determine where the skills’ gaps exist and create a skills’ development program that is not limited to in-house IT resources, but extends to any outsourced Cloud specialists. Vendors with specialised Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) products find themselves having to maintain a rigorous training regime to keep up with the investment demand of Cloud communities they have created and support.

Organisations should take advantage of the investment by Cloud providers to increase skills through the variety of online resources now available. The difference now is that organisations no longer need to invest directly in their own learning management systems (LMS) as Cloud providers see their LMS investments providing traction and portability for users entering or existing within Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), SaaS and PaaS product suites.

Details: Mark Unwin; 08 November 2021

Conclusion: Organisations are using chatbots as information assistants, advisors, and digital services channels. Most businesses start with generic chatbots (as virtual agents), but as the demand for customer communication grows, chatbots require integration with an increasing number of backend systems and improved scalability.

The reason why most chatbot ventures fail is the inability to recognise that the chatbot principle is simple, yet complexity of deployment rises sharply over time. In addition, chatbot design must align the business and target audiences, and both will evolve. This subtle shift over time is important as organisations need to learn the role, tone, specific purpose, and personalities of their chatbots based on actual usage and feedback.

Thus, starting small with continuous, incremental development is the best strategy for chatbot development. However, this iterative approach must balance the development of chatbots with business implementation, and must consider the attributes of the existing and future deployments.

Details: Joseph Sweeney; 08 November 2021

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IBRS advisor Joseph Sweeney said there was plenty of evidence that new entrants like ClickUp could make a splash in the “projects-oriented collaboration” space, where often there was a lack of standardisation of software used within individual organisations. Joseph Sweeney went onto say, Atlassian was relatively well entrenched with many customers across the different areas it served, and that ClickUp was more likely to be a threat to the raft of other smaller software players vying for the market.

Full Story.

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 03 November 2021

Australian enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform TechnologyOne commissioned first of its kind analysis from IBRS and Insight Economics found that fast-tracking a shift away from legacy on-premise systems would deliver $224 billion in economic uplift.

The $224 billion in economic benefits that are outlined in the TechOne report – which was produced independently by IBRS and Insight Economics and commissioned by TechnologyOne – were validated using the Monash Multiregional Forecasting (MMRF) model, which is frequently used by federal and state governments in the evaluation of new policy proposals and investment.

Full Story.

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 03 November 2021

The Latest

02 November 2021: Snowflake recently released the Snowflake Media Data Cloud that allows access to real-time, ready-to-query data products, and services from more than 175 data providers. The data-sharing company announced that its product can combine consumer data across sectors to reduce data latency and improve accuracy.

Why it’s Important.

More Australian organisations now recognise that access to external data enables enterprises to create one-to-one or one-to-many relationships for more reliable insights into data. Since it is difficult for businesses to make sense of data they don’t generate themselves, sharing information between internal business units inside the same company or between outside organisations, has narrowed insight gaps aside from lowering the cost of data collection and research. Some recent developments in this area include the following institutions that have extended their data sharing:

In 2014, Coles revealed that its online shoppers using Flybuys would have their personal information shared with 30 companies under the same Coles umbrella as well as with third parties in more than 23 countries.
Woolworths first started granting access to its consumer shopping behaviour data with all of its suppliers in 2017 to support collaborative decision-making with a customer-centric approach. However, it remains obstinate against disclosing all companies that handle its data when asked to submit comments during the Privacy Act review in 2021.
In June 2021, Bunnings announced an upgrade of its tech platform to capture customer information to improve buyer experience. Its privacy policy page explicitly discusses how information is shared with third party businesses such as financial searches, security providers, market research firms, and payment collectors.
Likewise, Target Australia discloses customer information to its service providers based overseas and to external call centres, recruitment companies and external fulfilment businesses.

Ensuring the rights of consumers whose data is being shared can be an issue and apprehensions about maintaining privacy and confidentiality are often raised. The government introduced open banking across the country to provide consumers greater control of their personal data, and with whom it is shared, when applying for banking services.

Enterprises in the data-sharing environment must also find ways to ensure fair and equitable advantage of the information by accessing the same level of data insights as their competitors do.

Who’s impacted

CIO
Development team leads
Business analysts

What’s Next?

Enterprises need to address the challenges of sharing large scale datasets, such as adherence to legislative and ethical frameworks, using personally identifiable information (PII) for testing, defining the critical role of service providers and their limitations, and improving the overall context of each shared data environment. This can be achieved if policies, procedures and standards on data privacy and security are aligned with data ethics that engender trust among the myriad direct and indirect actors involved in data sharing. Whatever goals such practice entails (such as developing innovative ancillary products with business partners or improving customer care by analysing real-time dashboards for rapid issue resolution), making the best use of opportunities in the field needs to be secure, lawful, just and ethical to ensure that collaboration leads to better decision making when building upon the work of others and fostering a culture of trust.

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 29 October 2021

The Latest

22 October 2021: Google’s latest digital solutions, product features and partnerships were unveiled at Google Cloud Next ’21. In this three-day event, Google and Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian led the keynote sessions on Google Cloud’s improved customer ecosystem and security capabilities.

Possibly the most significant announcement at the event was around Google Distributed Cloud. The Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) platform allows deployment of Cloud-native architecture to private data centres. GDC Edge provides capabilities to run applications at the ‘far edge’ of organisations - IoT devices, AI enabled devices, and so on - via low-latency LTE, radio access network (RAN) networks, and newer 5G Core network technology.

Google Distributed Cloud does not require enterprises to connect to Google Cloud when using their APIs or managing network infrastructure. This is important for organisations (e.g. public sector, finance, health) needing to retain on-premises deployment for tighter control over security and compliance.

Why it’s Important

With GDC, all the top three hyperscale Cloud vendors now have options to run applications developed for public Cloud across private and semi-private infrastructure. Furthermore, all three vendors have approaches to ‘edge’ computing. This is a natural evolution of the operational practices, automation and management software, software defined networking and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) that sees the Cloud seeping back into all areas of ICT. As this trend continues, and the lines between where ‘Cloud infrastructure’ sits, organisations will need to make decisions on the key automation and management platforms they will adopt across Clouds.

More organisations have started looking for better solutions to place their Cloud resources anywhere and in any geolocation. This offers considerable reductions in latency by eliminating the distance between users and their content to ensure highly available data while keeping costs low.

Who’s impacted

CIO
Development team leads
Business analysts

What’s Next?

All the hyperscale Cloud vendors are offering this type of flexibility and they are strongly expected to improve over time. It will further drive hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) investments driven by the demand for cost-effective scalable storage with strong durability and availability guarantee.

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 22 October 2021

The Latest

22 October 2021: At Google Cloud Next ’21, Google announced the general availability of a PostgreSQL interface to its hyperscale, global spanning Spanner relational database. In short, this means that organisations that have applications that are compatible with PostgreSQL can now migrate to a highly elastic database that is significantly less costly, more robust than running PostgreSQL instances on virtual machines.

Why it’s Important

Google’s highly scalable Cloud relational Spanner database provides high-velocity transactions, strong consistency, and horizontal partitioning across global deployments. Like other specialised, serverless Cloud databases, Spanner previously required legacy (on-premises) applications’ data access layers to be reworked.

The addition of a PostgreSQL interface greatly reduces development teams’ workload for migrating applications to Spanner. This has several knock-on impacts when migrating applications to the Cloud, including:

reducing training / new skills development, and allowing existing skills to be fully leveraged
reducing the vector for new bugs to be introduced
simplifies testing

Overall, this significantly lowers the cost and risk of moving an app to the Cloud.

As always, the devil is in the detail. Cloud Spanner Product Manager, Justin Makeig posted that the platform does not yet have universal compatibility for all PostgreSQL features, since the company’s goal was to focus on portability and familiarity. However, IBRS has determined that even with the current level of functionality, the PostgreSQL interface for Spanner presents good value for teams looking to migrate legacy applications to the Cloud.

Google is not the only hyperscale Cloud vendor that has enabled this type of operability. However, Cloud Spanner is more economical than competitive hyperscale Cloud database products at this time.

Who’s impacted

Development team leads
Cloud architecture teams

What’s Next?

Google announced that it is planning to expand its Spanner integration to additional database standards. Data portability and migration of legacy applications to hyperscale Cloud is now a focus for many ICT groups. The availability of open standard SQL interfaces to database PaaS (platform-as-a-Service) is expected to be a trend for application and data migration, especially where the applications are complex.

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 22 October 2021

Talk to an IBRS Advisor

The Latest

22 October 2021: Google introduced the Work Safer program at the Google Cloud Next ’21 event. The new program includes the Google Workspace suite of products, and adds several third party cyber security services for endpoint security and access to legacy solutions. In addition, Google unveiled upgraded devices, including new Chromebooks from HP.

A new in-house Google Cyber security Action Team was also introduced in the event. The group will take the lead in developing cyber security and digital products by leveraging the capabilities of the Work Safer program and developing training and policy materials..

Interestingly, Google is offering a whopping 50% discount for the term of the initial contact for all products (its own and third parties) within the Work Safer program.

Why it’s Important

The aim of the Work Safer program is to reinvigorate interest in the Google Workspace ecosystem.

Microsoft continues to have a near monopoly on the office productivity space, and is using that position to drive organisations towards its Azure Cloud ecosystem and its security ecosystem. Microsoft’s strength is its breadth of services, support for legacy solutions and resistance to change by both desktop teams and office staff. Creating sufficient impetus for change to a light-touch, collaborative environment of the magnitude Google proposes is hard.

Google Workspaces has a far smaller attack vector compared to Microsoft. Its architecture has been firmly rooted in zero trust since its inception - from the devices all the way to the apps, storage and access controls. However, organisations that have not yet gone down the Google path retain a significant array of existing network investments, legacy solutions, mixed access controls and identity management, devices and so on. To meet these clients' needs, Google has partnered with CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks to come up with endpoint protection and threat detection solutions. The partnerships should not be viewed as “Google is backfilling weaknesses in its ecosystem” (which is something we expect to hear from Google’s competitors soon. Instead, these partnerships should be viewed as Google recognising its ecosystem will need to sit alongside ecosystems based on architectures that were conceived several decades ago and retain complexities that need to be addressed.

With more businesses shifting to a remote or hybrid work setup, the risks of ransomware attacks through phishing campaigns, malware infections and data leaks pose a threat to these companies’ data security practices. As such, Google easily benefits from its product’s value proposition already being consumed.

Therefore, it would appear that Google’s messaging is on point.

However, from roundtable discussions with digital workspace teams held this month, IBRS has confirmed that Australian organisations’ ICT groups and senior executives continue to resist a major step-change in the office productivity and device space. Rather, most organisations continue to look for ways to extract more value from their existing Microsoft contracts, increasingly looking to expand their investments into Microsoft’s E5 security offerings.

In short, Google’s challenge is not convincing organisations they have a better, leaner security model. It is not even being less costly than Microsoft.

It is literally resistance to change.

Who’s impacted

CIO
Development team leads
Business analysts

What’s Next?

Even if an organisation is unlikely to switch to Google Workspace, it is beneficial to review Google’s architecture and which aspects can be applied to the existing architecture.

Organisations should also consider running Google Workspaces experiments with groups of remote / hybrid workers that have less connection with legacy solutions.

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 22 October 2021

The Latest

22 October 2021: Microsoft recently unveiled the latest versions of its Surface line of devices with versatile form factors to cater to different use cases. Highlights include the redesigned 13-inch Surface Pro 8 tablet with 11th generation Intel processor, the portable Surface Go 3, the laptop/tablet Surface Pro 7+, the pocket-sized Surface Duo 2, and the highly anticipated Surface Laptop Studio.

Why it’s Important

Microsoft released its redesigned Surface lineup form factor alongside its rollout of Windows 11 earlier this month. While there are plenty of improvements in the new lineup, most are best described as evolutionary: more computing power, refinement of form factors, etc.

However, two products stand out as potential new niche market makers: the Duo 2 and the Surface Laptop Studio.

The Duo 2: Win-Win or Double-Trouble?

IBRS has obtained a Surface Duo 2 and finds it fits somewhere between a smartphone and a tablet… yet not quite matching either role. While Samsung found some success with its Galaxy Z Fold device as a smartphone, the Duo 2 tends more towards the tablet end of the market.

If the Duo 2 is to be successful, it will be due to Microsoft defining a new niche for mobile prosumer (professional- level consumers). The success of the device will indicate that there is no single market niche for foldable devices (as they are currently being touted), but several sub-niches tied more to screen size, onscreen keyboard capabilities and photography prowess.

On the flip side (pun intended), first impressions of the Duo 2 suggest it may be a workable alternative to the semi-ruggedised, larger format smartphones which are making inroads against traditional fully-ruggedised tablets.

The additional screen space and size of the on-screen keyboard, positions the Due 2 slightly above most of the large format phones for field workers. It is even passable (just) for running remote virtual desktop applications.

Surface Laptop Studio: Solves the problem you didn’t know you had

IBRS has also trialled the Surface Laptop Studio. IBRS believes this device serves a new niche between more traditional laptops (such as the Surface Book) and hybrid devices (such as the Surface Pro).

The Laptop Studio has a hinge at the back to help set up the device in three versatile constructions: a regular laptop, a ‘stage’ mode where the screen is closed when streaming or engaged in video calls, and the ‘studio’ mode where the screen slides out flat, effectively turning the device into a graphic-intensive tablet.

From observations during ‘digital workspace’ consulting engagements, IBRS has noted that the Surface Pro is often used as a ‘primary desktop’ (meaning, used mostly when seated as a staff-members regular desk and in the home office). The weakness here is that the device is better suited for mobile (nomadic) work.

The Laptop Studio is more geared towards a desk-top experience, while also providing for flexible user configuration. For example, it features more connectivity ports, but less focus on the battery

Microsoft is not the only company implementing a new form factor to cater to users’ needs for devices that straddle between existing designs. Acer’s ConceptD 3 Ezel and HP’s Spectre Folio also share the same form factor as the Surface Laptop Studio.

It is likely this ‘desktop oriented yet flexible’ form factor will gain ground as more organisations adapt to the demands of hybrid working. It is not enough to consider someone working between multiple office locations as being a ‘remote worker’. Rather, they are full-time office workers that may wish to move between locations, while gaining the ability to host video conferencing, engage in pen / tablet creative work, and switch back to having a more traditional desktop experience.

Who’s impacted

Procurement
Digital workspaces / end-user computing teams

What’s Next?

The evolution of end user devices is ongoing - albeit slowly and with more than a few dead-ends. Manufacturers continue to experiment with new market niches, as organisations become more selective with devices that meet specific needs.

The upshot of this is that care should be taken when developing ‘personas’ for digital workspaces. Keep in mind that a persona is not solely related to a staff member’s ‘job’ (which is really multiple different types of jobs). It needs to factor the environment, the tasks performed in the context of the environment, and the staff's ability to switch between different devices based on needs at any given time.

In addition, when determining mobile force field device needs, do not limit the evaluation to the features of fully rugged products. Instead, consider the lifecycle of the products and software dependencies. Only then should an organisation decide which available devices on the market can best cater to the work contexts and personas you have.

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 22 October 2021

IBRSiQ is a database of Client inquiries and is designed to get you talking to our advisors about these topics in the context of your organisation in order to provide tailored advice for your needs.

Details: Joseph Sweeney; 18 October 2021

The economic benefits are revealed in a report produced by IBRS and Insight Economics and commissioned by enterprise software firm TechnologyOne and quantify for the very first time the $224bn economic opportunity that can be unlocked if the public and private sectors embrace new innovations and replace redundant IT platforms with next-gen Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology.

According to the report, every year more than $70bn of the $98bn spent in Australia on software is directed towards legacy on-premise platforms, which costs the economy billions and has a detrimental environmental impact through higher emissions.

Full Story.

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 14 October 2021

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an emerging technology that can be applied across business lines and yield significant results when aligned with business priorities. Assessing the AI maturity of your organisation can assist in providing AI roadmaps and aid in developing strategies and business cases.

The purpose of this presentation kit is to provide an AI maturity model in the analytics space. The proposed maturity model can be applied to any type of industry. Log in and click the PDF above to download the 'Analytics Artificial Intelligence Maturity Model' presentation kit and discover:

An IBRS AI maturity model that provides the foundation to apply the existing AI technology where it matters to the business
Guidelines to evolve into the future, whereby only limited data is available to make informed decisions
Next steps for your organisation

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 11 October 2021

Talk to an IBRS Advisor

Conclusion:

Dual SIM mobile phones can deliver value to employers and employees alike in an increasing transient and gig economy workforce. Mobile phone policies need to be modified and adapted to ensure BYO devices are enabled with a corporate SIMs business number, and a suite of corporate apps. It should be as effective as providing a new starter with a laptop.

The market is responding with increasing product sophistication to address these overlapping demands of business and personal use. A business number and applications can reside effectively on one handset alongside a private number and personal applications provided both are addressed by technology and policies. The business policy must be designed to promote business benefits first principles.

Porting of business numbers has become clumsy with businesses bearing the cost of number porting. Users are also left with the dilemma of managing one or more handsets to retain their personal information, or worse still, having to sacrifice a long-held number to accept a business phone. Reducing these legacy policies and supporting dual SIM phones will contribute to greater employee choice and satisfaction rather than addressing business benefits alone.

Details: Mark Unwin; 07 October 2021

Conclusion:

Implementing machine learning operations (MLOps) is complicated by several challenges: the number of the stakeholders involved in a project; the shortage of people with the necessary skills; the scope of regulatory compliance; validation of the machine learning (ML) model; and model degradation issues. Considering how these challenges will be addressed is a vital precursor for the successful implementation of MLOps.

Details: Joseph Sweeney; 07 October 2021

The Latest

22 September 2021: Six months after GorillaStack has released capabilities to monitor and apply rules to any AWS events, it has added similar functionality to Azure. The new service enables greater governance and automation of Azure. The new Azure service focuses on identifying when bad changes - particularly those that may impact security - occur.

Why it’s Important

As previously discussed, Aussie born GorillaStack is one of the earliest vendors to address the complexities of Cloud cost management.

Since its inception, GorillaStack has evolved into a more expansive Cloud monitoring service, with a growing focus on security and compliance. In March 2021, GorillaStack announced real-time event monitoring for AWS. With this announcement, it expands the monitoring of events to Azure, and confirms IBRS analysis that Cloud cost optimisation and security compliance go hand-in-hand. In short, enforcing configurations for security follows the same processes and uses common architectures as enforcing financial governance within Cloud infrastructure.

Who’s Impacted

CIO
CISCO
Cloud teams

What’s Next?

When reviewing solutions for Cloud cost optimisation through compliance, consider the extent to which the service can also assist with tightening up security. Conversely, when looking at tools to help enforce Cloud security compliance, consider how these may also be used to manage costs.

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 27 September 2021

ICT executives and data analytics specialists are facing ever-increasing demands from business stakeholders. Driven by vendors’ promises of agile, self-service analytics and instant access to big data, business stakeholders expect the world, while concerns of governance and data quality are often overlooked.

In this webinar replay, IBRS explores the growing tension between business stakeholders expectations and the ICT group’s ability to provide appropriate guardrails for analytics.

The video explores:

How the concerns of business stakeholders differ from those of ICT
The four operating models of business intelligence
The emergence of data mesh architecture, and the potential impact
Using data literacy maturity to drive an evolving and practical data strategy

Download the presentation kit: Business-First_Analytics_Webinar.pdf

Details: Joseph Sweeney; 24 September 2021

As self-service data analytics and visualisation becomes mainstream – due in no small part to Microsoft’s Power BI strategy – traditional data teams within IT groups need to reconsider traditional business intelligence architectures and plan a migration to a new environment. Underpinning the new architecture must be a sharper focus on tools and practices to support data governance, which is not a strength of Microsoft’s portfolio.

Download the 'Power BI is Driving Data Democratisation: Prepare Now' presentation kit and discover:

The key areas of business intelligence to inform your Power BI strategy
Next steps for your organisation

Details: Joseph Sweeney; 22 September 2021

Talk to an IBRS Advisor

Conclusion:

The choices when selecting and designing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution are immense and typically require industry-specific considerations. Executives rightly desire fully-integrated IT services across all departments within an organisation. The end result is a reliable, fully-integrated, and secure solution whether it is deployed in a public or hybrid Cloud solution.

What should not be up for negotiation are the essential, machine critical controls (CCs) that maintain the effectiveness and security of this critical asset during normal business operations. In all, IBRS previously addressed the 10 human-facing CCs¹. In this research article, the focus is the remaining 10 machine CCs.

Details: Mark Unwin; 05 September 2021

Conclusion:

Low-code is not a novel technology. Rather, it is an evolutionary technology that started as rapid application design (RAD) in the late ’80s, transitioned into business process modelling (BPM) in the 2000s, which then evolved into e-forms in 2010, before finally becoming low-code in 2020.

This evolution has been a meandering path and has spawned a broad ecosystem of solutions, each with unique traits and features that fit specific organisational structures. IBRS has listed key traits of modern low-code platforms to match your organisation’s ecosystem and help streamline the process of shortlisting a platform.

The most important trait of the new low-code platform will be how well it supports the transition from the existing ICT-centric governance model to a new model that must be defined by potential benefits and risks.

Details: Joseph Sweeney; 05 September 2021

According to a landmark economic analysis from IBRS and Insight Economics, Australia’s Federal and State government sector could unlock an $62 billion ‘digital dividend’ by replacing old technology with Cloud-based Software as a Service systems (SaaS).

In their report, “The Economic Impact of Software-as-a-Service”, IBRS and Insight Economics set out to analyse, for the first time, the savings from modernising IT systems across a range of industries including government, education, health & aged care and financial services.

Full Story.

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 31 August 2021

The Latest

19 August 2021: Microsoft has announced pricing increases for its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 offerings, which has resulted in a great deal of media coverage.Microsoft is at pains to point out that it has not increased its prices on 365 for a decade, and during that time has added a great deal of functionality (20+ applications) to the portfolio.

The Specifics

Microsoft is still working through how the new pricing will be applied in the Australian market and an announcement is expected soon. IBRS will perform a detailed cost analysis at this time. However, Microsoft has confirmed that any changes to local pricing will mimic the North American price changes.

Based on the US data, enterprise and business plans will see increases in March 2021. Based on US$, the dollar amounts range from US$1 to US$4 per user per month, or US$12 to US$48 per user per year, with the percentage increases running from a low of 9% to a high of 25%. Microsoft F-series licences for frontline workers and Microsoft 365 E5 are not subject to price increases. Consumer and education-specific plans (the A-series) are also unaffected by the price increases.

The new pricing structures will disproportionately impact small businesses and those with the lower levels of the Microsoft suite, while enterprises with E5 licences will be left unscathed. That in itself reveals Microsoft’s clear intent to nudge the market towards its E5 offerings. It is estimated that only 8% of Microsoft customers globally opt for E5 licensing, though IBRS has seen strong interest among Australian organisations to at least explore the more expansive capabilities found in E5.

At this time, we believe the majority of IBRS clients will see price increases in the lower range. However, given that Australia has been one of the fastest adopters of Office 365, and has for decades suffered from ‘the Australia tax’ of software vendors, the increases will still be felt deeply across the industry.

Why it’s Important.

For many IBRS clients, the immediate impact is the need to set aside extra budget for its existing 365 environment.

Something that is not gaining attention is that the new pricing also increases the cost of Microsoft’s Unified support, since it is calculated as a percentage (10-12%) of the overall Microsoft spend. IBRS recommends that organisations set aside a budget for this increase as well.

However, the price increase is not the full story. A closer look at how the new pricing is structured, plus other less publicised changes, suggests it is geared towards making E5 licences more attractive to mid-sized organisations.

The increases came shortly after Microsoft announced that its perpetual-licence Office would see a 10% increase and that its service for Office would drop from 7 years (it was previously 10) to just 5. Even more telling is that Microsoft has effectively engineered a one year ‘gap’ in N-2 support for Office (with the persistent licensing model), which forces organisations with older Office Pro licences to either purchase an upgrade sometime before 2023, or migrate to Office 365.

In summary, Microsoft’s recent changes to Office licensing are a strategy that makes the price difference from E3 to E5 licensing less imposing and makes sweating perpetual Office licences far less attractive, if not unworkable. The savings from sweating Office licences over a five-year period are still there, but they are significantly lower than with seven-year cycles.

IBRS has long stated that Microsoft’s goal is not necessarily to drive up ICT budgets. A closer look at the additional capabilities found in E5 licensing reveals that most are aimed at moving Microsoft into adjacent product sets. For example, the additional security capabilities that become available with E5 licensing are clearly aimed at security incumbents, such as Symantec. Microsoft’s E5 strategy is to pull ICT budget away from competitors and into its own coffers. It is about carving out competition.

Who’s impacted

CIO
CFO & procurement
Digital workspace teams

What’s Next?

In the Australian market, IBRS sees few enterprises still on persistent licensing for Office. Globally, Australia has been an early adopter of E3 licensing, though until the mass push to work from home in 2020, many organisations did not take full advantage of the additional features and collaboration capabilities of the 365 platform. Furthermore, Google Workspaces is only making marginal increases in the local market, meaning Microsoft has little real local competitive forces working to temper it in the office productivity space (though this is not the case in other markets in the Asian region).

Therefore, the question for organisations is, is this strategy to push customers from existing E3 licences to E5 licences a trigger to start re-evaluate ways to leverage more value from the Microsoft ecosystem (that is, double-down on Microsoft).

Organisations may respond to this price increase and Microsoft’s strategy to push customers from existing E3 licences to E5 licences as a trigger to:

Re-evaluate ways to leverage more value from the Microsoft ecosystem (that is, double-down on Microsoft). Just prior to this announcement, IBRS had drafted a paper on how to decide between E3 and E5 licensing. It is due for publishing in the coming month. However, if you wish an advance (draft) copy, please request it from nbowman@ibrs.com.au. It is focused on how to evaluate the additional benefits of E5 in the context of your existing software ecosystem.
Set up a ‘plan b’ for enterprise collaboration. In a practical sense, this would likely be a shift to Google Workspace for part of the organisation, coupled with a percentage (generally 20-30%) of the organisation also having Office software, though not necessarily Office 365.
Set aside 12-15% extra budget for the existing E3 environment, plus a similar increase for support of the Office environment, and re-evaluate the situation in 2-3 years

IBRS also recommends considering what will happen in another 10 years, when many organisations have migrated to E5 (which is likely). What new business risks will emerge from this? Migrating from Office 365 E3 to a competitive product (e.g. Google or Zoho) is hard enough. When E5 features are fully leveraged, the lock-in is significant, but so too is the value. At the end of the day, the ultimate risk factor is trust in Microsoft not to engage in rent-seeking behaviour.

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 30 August 2021

The Latest

12 August 2021: TechnologyOne released a significant report based on a six-month long study into the economics of Cloud computing and SaaS among Australian organisations.

The study, which was independently conducted by IBRS and Insight Economics, explored the tangible costs associated with migrating to the Cloud, with both IaaS and SaaS journeys investigated. An economic analysis of the data collected through 67 in-depth case studies with CIOs and C-suite executives, additional interviews, and over 400 respondents, revealed a $224bn economic dividend for the Australian economy, prompting TechnologyOne to term the report "too big to ignore".

Why it’s Important.

While the report is aimed at policymakers and strategies looking at the macro-economic impact of technology, it also details the costs and benefits of Cloud adoption by industry sectors, providing IT strategists with realistic benchmarks.

When developing the methodology for the report, IBRS and Insight Economics took a ‘no free lunches’ approach to data collection. Unlike other reports on the benefits of Cloud migration, the study took into account the costs of, and time needed for transition, including training, change management, skills (and skill shortages) and the fact that many organisations will need to retain on-premise environments to support legacy and home-grown applications for years to come. In addition, only productivity benefits that had been measured were included in the analysis.

As a result of the evidence-only approach to the study, the ‘direct returns’ on Cloud migration detailed in the report are both far lower and far more realistic than those found in studies conducted in the USA and Europe.

The report may be accessed here: https://toobigtoignore.com.au/

Who’s impacted

CEO, COO, CFO, CIO
Cloud migration teams

What’s Next?

The conservative approach to the study, the rich data collected, means that organisations still struggling to make a business case for SaaS have practical benchmarks and economic modelling to call upon.

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 23 August 2021

Talk to an IBRS Advisor

The Latest

28 July 2021: During Inspire, Microsoft unveiled Windows 365, which it positions as a Cloud desktop service. IBRS views Windows 365 as an evolution of existing virtual desktop solutions.

In addition, Windows Virtual Desktop services have been rebranded as Azure Desktop Services. With this rebranding, Microsoft also introduced a number of enhancements, including closer integration with Azure Active Directory (AAD) and Endpoint-Manager, with the ability to deploy applications across both physical devices and Cloud-based desktops based on roles.

Windows 365 is built on top of Azure Virtual Desktop service. The difference between Windows 365 and Azure Desktop Services is that Windows 365 has more automated, easier deployment and administration options. It is well suited to organisations with minimal VDI specialisation and more akin to a ‘fully managed virtual desktop environment’.

In contrast, Azure Desktop Services is better suited to larger organisations that have a need for a high level of customisation. It is more akin to a virtualised Citrix farm.

Why it’s Important.

In 2019, Microsoft quietly changed the licensing conditions for running virtual servers in the Cloud, which hindered VMware’s ability to migrate VDI (among other services) to hyper-scale Cloud services. Since then, IBRS has had reports of efforts to migrate VDI into the Cloud stifled by rights, with Microsoft partners steering organisations to an ‘all-in Azure’ approach.

The introduction of Windows 365 and the rebranding of Azure Virtual Desktop certainly fits a strategy of selecting alternative virtual desktop environments less compelling.

This is not to say that Microsoft’s VDI capabilities are not solid offerings. Windows 365 certainly addresses a problem in the Australian market, where fully managed VDI has suffered greatly from vendors under-scoping the resources needed to run a client's environment in order to come in at the lowest possible cost. Autoscaling in the Windows 365 environment largely eliminates this issue. The level of automation is also impressive, as is an application cook

Who’s impacted

CIO
Development team leads
Business analysts

What’s Next?

Windows 365 is a viable option for specific use VDI cases, and it may be considered against traditional fully managed desktop vendor solutions. However, it may not be cost-effective at scale. Solutions from AWS, VMWare and Google should also be examined, though it is important to consider the total cost of operation of this type of VDI, not just the licensing / service costs. Be sure to factor in human resources for administration, application compatibility testing and packaging (which are significant hidden costs and often overlooked, as well as help desk and support.

In addition, if staying within the Microsoft stack, Azure Desktop Services can provide a more flexible and scalable solution. Again, be sure to factor in the total cost of operation.

Overlooked by many discussions of Cloud VDI is the rise of Cloud application virtualisation services from the likes of Cameyo. Rather than presenting an entire desktop, these services only stream a configured application, either in a manner that makes it appear as a native application or within a web browser. Such an approach is significantly lower cost than traditional VDI. When considering a new virtual environment for your workers, both VDI and Virtual Application Delivery (VAD) options should be considered.

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 23 August 2021

The Latest

3 August 2021: Salesforce has announced an agreement to acquire Servicetrace, a robotics process automation vendor. This marks another milestone in Salesforce’s strategy to deliver enterprise SaaS solutions surrounded by a mesh of low-code process automation and integration. It is also evidence of how the previously disparate markets for low-code application development tools, RPA, process mapping, and integration tools are consolidating into a service mesh that goes beyond process digitisation. In this case, when coupled with enterprise SaaS, the sum is greater than the parts.

Why it’s Important.

In the IBRS trends report for 2021-2026, a fourth-wave of ICT was detailed. The crest of this wave is the rapid consolidation of low-code, process mapping, RPA and (soon) rules engines, and AI.

However, IBRS case studies with scores of executives involved in Cloud migration strategies, suggest that many organisations ICT groups are resistant to the coming wave. This is mainly due to sunk costs in on-premises software and infrastructure, the difficulty in justifying costs of integrating disparate systems and, at least to some degree, concerns over losing control or lacking skills to manage core infrastructure.

The cost of integration coupled with the need for digitising manual processes is currently a real economic barrier. Financial modelling suggests that the labour and costs of integrating disparate (on-premises and Cloud) solutions can destroy the return on investments for Cloud migration in the near to mid-term (1-5 years). This is especially problematic for industries with a complex mix of specialist enterprise solutions, such as healthcare and utilities.

Who’s impacted

CIO
Development team leads
Business analysts

What’s Next?

Organisations that have previously rejected Cloud migrations due to not being able to make the financials stack up should consider re-evaluating the decision in 2022, taking into account the potential of buying into a mesh ecosystem that unifies low-code, workflow, process mapping, RPA rules engines and possibly AI services and that supports SaaS enterprise solutions ‘out of the box’.

Enterprise architects should also consider a shift towards a fourth-wave of ICT will impact their organisation’s ICT architecture and, if needed, begin planning to evolve to a new environment.

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 23 August 2021

The Latest

16 August 2021: Zoom is best known for its video conferencing solution, which set new standards for ease of use and quick adoption, which in turn saw its usage skyrocket during the first months of COVID-19 lockdowns. The firm’s brand is now so ingrained that staff often refer to video conferencing as ‘zoom calls’ and the public use the terms ‘zooming’ and ‘zoom me’, even when Zoom may not be technology in use. Unfortunately for Zoom, its strong brand recognition with video calls often obscured the breadth of its unified communications (UC) ecosystem.

Zoom is attempting to reposition its brand as an end-to-end UC platform. The topics for its planned Zoomtopia summit, scheduled for the 14th of September, are clear indicators of where Zoom will focus its efforts in the coming year:

Public sector
Education
Healthcare
Financial services

IBRS recent interviews as part of the Cloud economic study found these four sectors have all been particularly impacted by COVID-19 in terms of service delivery volume and increasing expectations on multichannel (if not omnichannel) experiences. So Zoom’s targeting makes sense.

Why it’s Important.

The requirements for UC are shifting from internal standardisation (cost optimisation, ensuring staff can communicate efficiently and switch between communications modes) to external flexibility (delivering services using end-points that the public have on hand). It is for this reason that both Microsoft Teams and Zoom are finding their way into call centre strategies. It is not just that these video communications technologies fit within a larger communications ecosystem, but that the majority of the public are familiar with the services and likely have clients already installed on their devices. The mature wave of UC, which IBRS introduced 14 years ago, is moving from the trailblazers into the mainstream.

Who’s impacted

User experience / customer journey teams
Development team leads
Customer service teams
Call centre teams

What’s Next?

There two key triggers for replatforming an organisation’s UC environment, or at least introducing a new UC platform:

An overhaul of call centres, possibly in conjunction with CRM modernisation.
Replacement of legacy PBX or VoiP solution

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 16 August 2021

The Latest

18 August 2021: While natural language processing AIs are becoming increasingly accurate in how they respond to questions, their ability to explain how they arrived at their answers has been limited. As The Doctor reveals, confronting a rogue AI in the Green Death, ‘Why?’ remains, perhaps, the hardest question for machine intelligence. IBM’s AI Horizons Network is developing a method to enable AIs to explain their reasoning with a common sense data set.¹

Why it’s Important.

Today, virtual service agents, both customer facing and internal IT held-desks, are effective and very efficient FAQs. They can identify a context from natural language and then provide answers to questions, as well as provide follow up answers based on the original context. However, they cannot provide details as to how they arrived at any given answer, which generally leads to a request for human manual intervention.

Specialists who develop conversation virtual service agents, work around these limitations by programmatically refining the answers AIs have available (i.e. curating the FAQ) to include reasons. E.g. “Your transaction has been declined because of XYZ.”

IBMs work to allow AIs to report back on their reasons, may not only minimise the programming effort needed to develop virtual agents, but allow them to report decision-making in ways that organisations have not considered.

While AI development will remain a niche activity for most Australian organisations, AI will increasingly find its way into enterprise SaaS products. Natural language AIs coupled with machine learning over knowledge assets held in core enterprise systems will see a rapid increase in the use of virtual agents, both for internal and external services.

Who’s impacted

AI specialists
Service automation / customer experience teams
ICT strategy leads

What’s Next?

The rapid improvements in AI quality, coupled with their integration into most enterprise SaaS products, will make them ubiquitous for customer service delivery within the next 2-5 years.

Organisations need to start exploring the AI service agent capabilities already available in their SaaS products, and develop plans for how to leverage such capabilities. The goal should not be to deliver an ‘all-singing and dancing’ virtual agent experience, but rather to incrementally introduce capabilities over time, learning how clients and staff wish to interact, and continually leveraging advances in technology as they become available.

Related IBRS Advisory

Footnotes

1. COMMONSENSEQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge, 2019 Association for Computational Linguistics

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 16 August 2021

To improve call centre resources scheduling, some organisations have implemented software agents to either improve users’ experience and/or reach the right expert at the right time. Organisations should assess the software agent maturity and determine which level should be reached to fulfil the business imperatives.

5 levels of software agent maturity
9 qualifiers used to evaluate software agents
A self assessing approach to address software agent shortcomings

Details: Wissam Raffoul; 06 August 2021

Talk to an IBRS Advisor

Regardless of its digital strategy, many organisations have not been positioned to properly leverage the digital and data assets that are available to them. A Chief Data Officer (CDO) role can improve this situation by advancing an organisation’s data portfolio, curating and making appropriate data visible and actionable.

4 pivotal points of the CDO agenda
A sample framework on how to understand the ownership of a data domain
Next steps for your organisation

Details: Joseph Sweeney; 06 August 2021

According to a new analysis from IBRS, Australia could reap a $224bn dividend by fast-tracking investments in digital transformation – and grow the economy by 1.3 per cent, more than six times the benefit of the Olympic Dam Expansion.

Full Story.

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 04 August 2021

Conclusion:

There are many low-code myths in the market, some promoted by vendors and others touted by development teams that are resisting the trend. IBRS explores and debunks these myths.

Details: Joseph Sweeney; 04 August 2021

Conclusion:

Organisations must evolve practical and sustainable governance when incorporating low-code platforms into their enterprise architecture (EA). The majority of organisations will use more than one low code platform on their digital transformation journey. As a result, governance will need to encompass tenets that determine which tools (and thus skills and teams) are most appropriate for which types of applications and workflows.

Details: Joseph Sweeney; 04 August 2021

The Latest

27 July 2021: During Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP) analyst update, the vendor unveiled details regarding its Australian expansion with a new Melbourne data centre and new management for the ANZ region.

Why it’s Important

The new data centre is more an indication of overall Cloud growth in Australia, as IBRS has reported in the past. It is less a turning point in Google’s strategy, and more of a necessary response to market trends. It should be noted that a large set of GCP services will be available from the Melbourne zone, but not all. Others will be added ‘based on market demands’. This is a strategy that has been adopted by all three hyper-scale Cloud vendors, and is a clear indication of how Cloud usage is expanding in Australia: from core infrastructure services (especially storage, compute, containers and analytics) to more nuanced services, such as AI.

During the briefing, Google highlighted its private ANZ wide data network as a key differentiating factor. There is merit to this claim, as network infrastructure in Australia remains a thorny issue for Cloud clients outside the major States, such as Perth and Darwin, Adelaide, etc.

More telling was what was not elaborated upon during the briefing. In the past, Google has focused on its capabilities in AI as a key differentiator in the market. While Google clearly has strong credentials in AI, the reality is that most Australian organisations are not investing in AI directly, but rather obtaining it as part of other solutions.

For example, AI is found in capabilities of CRM products Salesforce (Einstein) and Zoho (Zia), in low-code products from Appian and Microsoft’s Power Platform and so on.

Instead, Google championed its partner program and its support credentials. Google knows channel partners are essential to competing against AWS and Microsoft. It also recognises that skills are in short supply, so is investing in training and support programs.

In reality, Google’s strongest competitive weapon is an age-old one: value for money. When evaluating like-for-like core compute and storage services, GCP is more economical than its two top rivals.

Who’s impacted

CIO
Cloud infrastructure teams

What’s Next?

Most organisations will end up with a multi-Cloud environment, though with a preference for a ‘primary’ platform. Many Cloud migration strategies IBRS reviews are scoped in such a way to limit the choice of deployment to Azure and/or AWS. Given the strengths of these two Clouds, this makes sense. Oracle’s Cloud platform is also appealing to Oracle customers looking for an ‘easy’ migration of their core services.

Far fewer Australian organisations are formally considering GCP as a viable alternative for running core workloads, or even leveraging it for failover/parallel workloads. This is a lost opportunity. While IBRS is not recommending GCP, it considers that the vendor is under-represented in shortlists and as a result, opportunities for Cloud cost optimisation and contestability in multi-Cloud environments suffer.

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 02 August 2021

Talk to an IBRS Advisor

The Latest

24 June 2021: Samsung Networks, which was launched early in 2021, has struck a deal with infrastructure supplier PLUS ES to support the deployment of Samsung’s 5G technologies. Given activities from other 5G vendors, it is clear that the 5G rollout in Australia will only accelerate.

Why it’s Important

5G will impact both consumer and business applications, as well as hybrid working. It is not just a matter of speed. With greater bandwidth and different cost points, new services become possible. For example: chatbots passing not to a human agent using text, but a human agent on video. These service delivery innovations need to be tested in terms of how the public will accept them, the operational and staffing changes needed to support them, and finally the IT issues and architecture they will raise (including what to do with all the new data coming in)!

CTOs and innovation teams in organisations with public-facing services need to be experimenting and testing new service delivery options and ideas now, since such services are likely to give a competitive advantage.

Who’s impacted

CIO
Development team leads
Business analysts

What’s Next?

If not already established, form a temporary committee to brainstorm the potential for 5G on:

Service delivery
Field operations and staff
Business processes, both internal and external, and how these can be digitised ‘into the field’
Hybrid working

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 09 July 2021

The Latest

2 July 2021: Amazon released a video summary and report on its sustainability targets and performance. The key take outs are that Amazon is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, with a shift of 42% from non-renewable within one year. The underlying message here is sustainability is no longer a political issue for the corporate sector, but a fiscal imperative.

Why it’s Important

As outlined in previous IBRS research, all of the hyperscale cloud vendors - Google, AWS, Microsoft, Oracle and Alibaba - have well-documented strategies to reduce their reliance on carbon-based fuel sources. All position sustainability as a competitive advantage, not just against each other, but against on-premises data centres.

It is likely that cloud vendors will be positioning their sustainability credentials in both business and general news channels, looking to position their brand as a leader on climate action. From a cynical view, this messaging will play well with the existing news cycle of the impact of climate change, from the disastrous bushfires to killer heatwaves in North America, to unseasonable storms and record-setting weather events. From a more optimistic perspective, these vendors will drive genuine solutions to reduce the carbon footprint associated with providing computing service.

Therefore, as cloud vendors set or meet zero carbon energy targets, the issue of sustainable ICT is set to re-emerge as a priority for CIOs and data centre architects.

IBRS and BIAP (via the IT Leaders Summits) have tracked CIOs interest in the topic of green IT. An IBRS study in 2008 had sustainable ICT being rated as ‘very important’ for 25% of CIOs and ‘somewhat important’ for 59% of CIOs. Since then, interest in sustainable computing has plummeted year-on-year. The IBRS / BIAP data for 2016 had 6% of CIOs rating sustainable ICT as a priority. By 2020, less than 0.5% of CIOs rated sustainable ICT as a priority.

IBRS expects this trend to reverse sharply in 2024-2025 as the leading cloud vendors continue to demonstrate both environmental and financial benefits associated with renewable energy.

Who’s impacted

CIO
CFO
Data centre leads
Infrastructure architects

What’s Next?

By 2025 the leading cloud vendors will leverage their position in renewable energy consumption as a selling point for policy-makers to mandate cloud computing and place unattainable goals for architects of on-premises data centres.

Rather than waiting, CIOs should review previous strategies for sustainable ICT, with the expectation that these will need to be updated and reinstated within the next 3-5 years.

Related IBRS Advisory

Details: IBRS Advisor Team; 09 July 2021

The true benefit of digital strategies is in the thinking, reviewing, assessing and critical evaluation of where the current state is and where the target needs to be. Organisations that have commenced digital transformation have recognised that capability development and ownership of the strategy can make or break success. It is critical to be brutally honest about capability and skills to get to the target.

Details: Sue Johnston; 05 July 2021

Too often, information communications technology (ICT) and business analytics groups focus on business intelligence and analytics architectures and do not explore the organisational behaviours that are required to take full advantage of such solutions. There is a growing recognition that data literacy (a subset of digital workforce maturity) is just as important, if not more important, than the solutions being deployed. This is especially true for organisations embracing self-service analytics.

The trend is to give self-service analytics platforms to management that are making critical business decisions. However, this trend also requires managers to be trained in not just the tools and platforms, but in understanding how to ask meaningful questions, select appropriate data (avoiding bias and cherry-picking), and how to apply the principles of scientific thinking to analysis.

Download the pdf now.

Staff_Need_Data_Literacy_Presentation_Kit_-_IBRS.pdf

Details: Joseph Sweeney; 05 July 2021

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