If your leadership team is not asking these questions right now, and insisting on finding answers…
Your technology investments are unlikely to drive your future growth.
Businesses Australia-wide are changing up their goals and priorities for the year ahead and recasting their forecasts and targets to maintain business strength through uncertain times; they’re zeroing in on waste, efficiency and their allocation tools, talent and investment.
How are growth-focused leaders choosing what to cut, what to back and what to postpone? Expecting people to work harder with less is not sustainable, impulse investing in some new wonder-solution is always risky, and continuing on doing the same thing expecting something different…well, you know how that goes…
Here are the critical technology questions in-the-know leaders are insisting their teams explore and produce answers to right now, so they can make strategic decisions that will drive success…not stagnation.
1. Are we ready to embark on Digital Transformation 2.0?
Yes, we know – the business world has been talking about Digital Transformation for years now. But whereas digital transformation 1.0, as we like to call it, was more or less code for “move to the cloud”, digital transformation 2.0 is less about new and more about building out what you have across your organisation to streamline how you operate and accelerate how you deliver more value to your customers.
Task your teams to look for ways to optimise your technology stack and how it’s used.
- Review and consolidate services and suppliers
- Explore ways to extract more value out of your existing services
- Embrace automation and AI to accelerate your efforts.
2. Do we need to “update” our cyber mindset?
Robust cybersecurity measures to protect data and maintain customer trust are now non-negotiable and investment in essential baseline security protections a cost-of-entry to business. However, leading companies with genuine growth ambitions have recognised (or learnt from experience) that changing external factors and new types of active adversary are outclassing some tried and tested IT security protections.
Growth leaders are managing and adapting their security mindset and position with:
- Active governance, management and monitoring,
- Combined with next-level threat detection, response and recovery activities,
- A shift in focus from cyber security to cyber resiliency.
3. Can we identify the data insights we really need?
Data, data everywhere and not a drop to drink? Pretty much every tool you adopt into your ecosystem comes with a side of data, but the prebuilt dashboards and filters typically showcase historical data, rather than generating any true analysis of leading indicators, current or emerging trends or movements.
Companies on a growth track will excel by:
- Understanding which data actually provides insights that could drive success, not just measure past performance.
- Considering the best ways for data to be presented to highlight changes, gaps and shortfalls.
- Accessing or building data analytics and interpretation skills to fast forward to getting the actionable insights you need.
4. How can we really personalise all our customers’ experiences?
A surprising upside to the surge in AI and automation tools is the ability for companies of any size to specifically tailor their products, services, their interactions, or even their initial approach to new customers at lightning speed and then pivot that approach again and again on a dime.
In a market where great customer experience is the benchmark and collecting and acting on customer feedback is an expected norm, those companies that will succeed in differentiating themselves are already
- Automating and centralising data and feedback collection.
- Using Generative AI tools to extract insights from that data.
- Leaning on Generative AI to draft highly personalised messaging and experiences on a scale never before viable.
5. How can we fix employee communication and collaboration?
At the end of the day, your staff just wants to be able to get their job done and handover to whoever is next in line to do their part. These workflows and transfers are the engine of your operations. And when your staff don’t have the tools they need, must swap between tools, or have too many different tools for different things, things start to slow down, get messy and eventually come unstuck. Poor communication and collaboration is taking it’s toll, with employee engagement at all-time lows!
With 3 out of 4 employees now saying they end up their own tools of choice into the workplace to get their job done, alongside some 70% employees reporting poor work engagement due to disruptions to work, it might be time to sit up and take notice of what the winning cohort of companies are doing right!
Bring together representatives across all parts of your organisation to:
- Uncover and reign in all those disparate services in use and find out what they’re being used for.
- Intentionally chose the communication and collaboration ecosystems best suited for your operations, your people and your stakeholders.
- Consolidate and streamline workflows through tools and train your team extensively to use them effectively!
6. What can we do to top up our talent?
Following on from the previous topic, leading companies are not only investing in their systems and workflows but invest in developing their talent into a skilled and motivated workforce. Technology is the key enabler for employee personal and professional development both inside and outside the workplace.
Successful companies that attract and retain top talent are:
- Growing their teams and capabilities through strategic hiring and partnerships.
- Investing in sustainable, self-service learning and development tools integrated into existing company systems.
- Implementing recognition and reward platforms that drive employee engagement and reward productivity.
7. How can we make AI ok?
There are risks to tolerating your employees’ uncontrolled use of Generative AI, but that is not a reason to blanket ban Generative AI use or experimentation across your organisation. There are unrivalled productivity and efficiency gains on offer to people and companies that embrace Generative AI and use it effectively, especially where high-value use cases have been identified and organisational messaging around the acceptable use of AI is consistent.
Companies doing great things are already on this track. Time to get in the game. They’ve:
- Engaged with their boards, management teams, staff and stakeholders on what’s AI-OK for your organisation and its purpose.
- Escalated these into hard governance discussions aimed at crafting a Generative AI strategy.
- Are providing the tools, training and guidance to their teams on how to use Generative AI safely and productively.
8. How hard can we push?
In times of change, human nature drives some of us to hunker down and ride out the storm. But delaying discussions on transformational change will only ensure you’re already on the backfoot when the storm clouds do pass.
Companies that are brave enough to start engaging their leadership teams in discussions around transformational technology questions are already future proofing their success.
- Are the risks to our business, information and people changing? Are we fighting fire with band-aids?
- What’s AI-ok for our organisation right now, what’s not, and how can be stay on top of this?
- As more people start replacing “googling it” with AI chat prompting, what does that mean for how we attract customer or talent in the market, or who controls the narrative about who we are and what we do?
- Where is all our data, and what’s it being used for? How can we govern what belongs to us but sits outside our control?
- How can we empower and support our people to embrace the change that’s coming on their terms and to their own advantage?
Need advice on how to get this done? The team at Maxsum can guide you through exactly how to initiate these discussions and plan for transformational technology change that drives success. Let’s have a chat about how you can plan and prepare your technology initiatives to achieve your goals in 2025.
