In this CIO Edge panel, CIOs from The Lottery Corporation, Westpac, and Defence share how tackling system complexity enables innovation, security, and scale.
Simplification is emerging as the key to speed, resilience, and reduced risk in large-scale organisations, where decades of complexity limit agility.
Loren Somerville, Chief Information Officer at The Lottery Corporation, explained how Australia’s lottery and gaming sector must reduce layers of legacy systems to innovate quickly and meet consumer demand.
With more than 7,000 retail outlets and over half of the Australian population engaging with lotteries and keno, speed to market is essential.
Loren highlighted that by treating technology as the core of the business, rather than a back-office function, The Lottery Corporation can deliver product innovation at pace and reduce the risks and costs that come with decades of layered systems.
Meanwhile, David Walker, Chief Technology Officer at Westpac Group, described how the bank has approached simplification through the Unite programme, one of the largest customer migrations and system transformations globally.
He outlined how translating complexity into metrics executives could understand was critical for board-level buy-in.
For example, David demonstrated that every $1 spent on change cost $1.70 due to complexity across a $3 billion programme.
To provide a clear target state, Westpac introduced the BEAD model—Built for change, Evergreen, Automated, Digital to the core—scoring each application and infrastructure component against these principles.
This created a framework that promoted long-term agility, automation, and digital resilience.
Chris Crozier, Chief Information Officer at the Department of Defence, outlined how Defence is tackling complexity on a national scale.
Historically siloed across Army, Navy, Air Force, Space, and Cyber, Defence is now transforming into a unified, enterprise-level federation capable of integrating data and systems.
Chris emphasised that advanced cloud adoption and secure handling of classified information are critical foundations, but success relies equally on culture.
Building trust, securing leadership buy-in, and fostering collaboration across services are essential to delivering both technological and operational outcomes in a volatile geopolitical environment.
Key takeaways:
- Simplification drives speed and reduces risk: Loren explained how decades-old layered systems in the lottery and gaming sector must be simplified to enable innovation, reduce risk, and position technology as the core of the business.
- Clear metrics and frameworks enable buy-in: David showed how Westpac quantified complexity and created the BEAD model to help executives and board members understand the value of simplification and support one of the world’s largest migrations.
- Culture and collaboration are critical in complex environments: Chris highlighted that for Defence, unifying historically siloed services depends not only on cloud and data integration but also on trust, leadership alignment, and collaboration.