Technology & AI
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Most organisations are being asked to have a position on AI before they've had a chance to work out what they actually need.
The questions that matter are rarely technical.
What problems are we trying to solve? What information do we hold, and how do we need to use it?
What needs to happen to our governance before we can move? Who decides, and at what point? How do we defend our choices to a board, a regulator, a funder, or the people we serve?
What capability do our people need? And what happens to the work they're doing now?
And how do we have this conversation honestly given everything’s moving so quickly?
I work with organisations on these questions. I'm not a vendor and I don't implement, so I’m not trying to sell a product or ‘the right answer’. Much of the work is conversation: getting people with very different levels of confidence, scepticism and anxiety about this technology into the same discussion, and helping them develop a shared understanding and ongoing capacity to continue decision-making once I've gone.
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I've spent twenty-five years working to make sure technology serves business needs, rather than the other way around. I launched and ran the Fairfax employment platforms, introduced automated credit decisioning for consumer lending at Bendigo Bank, built Australia Post's identity services business, and led innovative new platforms and solutions for the Victorian Government.
The technology keeps changing. What doesn’t change is the challenge of figuring out where it's actually needed, how it should be adopted, and what needs to change before it can create value.
Whether a technology ‘works’ for an organisation has much less to do with the technology, and much more to do with how the business organises itself to use it - the data management, governance, procurement, capability and behaviours.
My work in unpacking and finding a way forward here is the same work I do everywhere else: understanding what’s needed for change to happen and how to get started on the journey.