The success of continued digital transformation, customer experience and future innovation will depend on executive leadership skills and aligned resources, driving employee experience and productivity through technology uptake.  

Digital innovation and experience-centric operations will be driven by improved data and information architectures, allowing for automation, machine learning and AI. This will, in turn, enable visibility and context for service personalisation to gain a competitive advantage.  

At ADAPT’s CFO Edge panel discussion, ADAPT’s Senior Analyst, Peter Hind, gathered local experts from Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Slack, and Xero to explore practical ways to deploy the data-driven organisation with advanced analytics for timely, accurate insights and compete on experience.  

To unlock the full keynote video and access an entire catalogue of ADAPT’s expert presentations, localised research, case studies, downloadable data and community interviews, speak with a Senior Research Consultant today

 

Transcription: 

Peter Hind:  

You spoke before about using AI machine learning and how that frees people from the mundane to do the services.  

I knew you spoke to me about a word I rarely hear. So you told me how you like deviance. So why do you like deviance? 

Rachel Powell:  

I use the term positive deviance.  

Because, so I’ve done a master’s in positive psychology and I learned, and also I have had all of my career in the technology industry. I, therefore, have been in an industry that is constantly looking at disruption.  

Marrying the theories and the philosophies of positive psychology with that constant disruptive environment is where positive deviance comes in.  

And a lot of people have a connotation of negativity when it’s about deviance.  

But deviance it’s a scientific term that measures the distribution from the norm. Positive deviance is saying how are you different from the norm in a positive way.”

We are constantly looking when we’re thinking about the strategy of how we can be positively deviant. How can we be bold? How can we be innovative?  

How can we ensure that we’re instilling the right disciplines and the right processes and the right people experience and HR practices internally to encourage that positive deviance, which will be beneficial to our customers? 

Peter Hind:  

Martin, one thing you told me beforehand that you’re blessed at CBA with a very digital-savvy executive leadership.  

You said you couldn’t be a leader in a bank unless you’re digitally savvy.  

Absolutely. So how do you then engage work with them to help the bank protect itself from the disruptors who threaten it? 

Martin Anderson:  

That’s a great question.  

The biggest challenge we have is not really around the leadership team is because they’re very digitally savvy.  

It’s more around that frozen middle, the domain specialists that have all the knowledge about how to do the business the way that they know-how.”

It’s our responsibility as technologists to educate and elevate that tier of the organisation, bring them into our camp, show them the new ways of doing things, and move them towards that path of transformation.  

That education piece is critical for us to respond to disruption because there’s so much moving in this space. At the same time, we have strategic ventures such as existing ventures, which is part of our funding process towards disrupting business.

We have to look at every day for the marketplace because everyone knows you’ve got to keep innovating.  

You can’t sit still.  

Peter Hind:  

Okay, Matt, you talked to me about recognising the CEO as a very lonely role.  

How do you communicate with a CEO and give them ideas to help broaden their thinking of where the business needs to go without telling them how to do their job? 

Matt Loop:  

Delicately. Look, we’ve found success.  

And in fact, we had a workshop this morning with a large Australian organisation where it was exactly that.  

They were looking for innovation. It’s about finding starting small and finding a piece that we can latch on to that’s meaningful, take it out of theory and find a practical application.”

Our technology and how we can innovate a particular business process that this organisation and we’ve begun we’ve stood that up now, and they’ve seen some of the results from that.  

And now, the pallet is wet, and the conversations now a little bit more open than it was trying to come in with pie in the sky thinking or something that wasn’t understood yet.  

And so, we’ve been patient and focus on one small win.  

To unlock the full keynote video and access an entire catalogue of ADAPT’s expert presentations, localised research, case studies, downloadable data and community interviews, speak with a Senior Research Consultant today

Contributors
Peter Hind Principal Research Analyst
Peter Hind has spent the last 25 years as an analyst and commentator on the ICT industry. He says his primary areas... More

Peter Hind has spent the last 25 years as an analyst and commentator on the ICT industry. He says his primary areas of interest are the potential of technology to transform the way organisations operate, the change management obstacles executives encounter in realising this potential and the tactics and techniques leaders have deployed to overcome these difficulties.

Peter now takes on multiple roles within ADAPT including the moderation of private events and roundtables, interviewing business executives about the strategies they are pursuing and assisting with the structuring of our delegate surveys and the interrogation and analysis of ADAPT’s treasure trove of end-user and C-level data

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Rachael Powell Chief Customer Officer at Xero
Rachael is responsible for Xero’s global sales, marketing, communications, and customer functions globally. Throughout her career she has held leadership positions in... More

Rachael is responsible for Xero’s global sales, marketing, communications, and customer functions globally. Throughout her career she has held leadership positions in marketing, sales and HR, predominantly in digital and technology companies.

Rachael believes customer experience must resonate from the inside-out and advocate for positive engagement programs to effectively mobilise the business strategy at scale. She has a Masters in Applied Positive Psychology, a Masters in Business Administration, a Bachelor of Business (Accounting and Marketing) and am a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

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Matt Loop Head of APAC at Slack
Matt is responsible for the success of the Slack network of employees, customers and partners across the region. Slack is the collaboration... More

Matt is responsible for the success of the Slack network of employees, customers and partners across the region. Slack is the collaboration hub that brings the right people, information and tools together to get work done. From FTSE 100 companies to corner shops, millions of people around the world use Slack to connect their teams, unify their systems and drive their business forwards.

Prior to Slack, Matt spent 7 years at LinkedIn, helping establish the Sales Solutions business across Asia Pacific and most recently leading their North American enterprise sales organisation. He relocated to Australia in 2004 to open the Asia Pacific offices for Salesforce.com, where he spent 10 years leading and scaling their commercial sales and NPO groups and helping grow the business from 0 to 700+ regional employees.

Matt is passionate about helping the startup community and leadership development, serving on the advisory board of Outreach, the world’s leading sales engagement platform, and as a regional head of Revenue Collective, a global membership group focused on the professional development and success of revenue leadership.

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