EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

This is the ultimate show for IT Leaders in Australia. You get all the insights, all the facts, and everybody’s gonna sit there and enjoy it. Thanks for being back with us, Jono. Here we are again. Uh, I have to ask the question. Something’s happened to your thumb. What’s going on there?  

Look, I don’t wanna say too much about it. 

Naran, uh, I, it’s still attached, right?  

Uh, accidents happen. Mm-hmm. We’ll leave a little bit of mystery for the audience. Right. Maybe if you leave a bit of mystery, they can come up with their own stories mm-hmm. As to, as to what could have happened. But I’m grateful to still have a thumb.  

Right. You weren’t nervously biting your finger ’cause you were anxious about the show or anything like that? 

Not at all, mate. Good. No. We’re gonna be okay.  

Right? Good. Well, look, I have been hanging out with researchers lately. I went to Brisbane. And caught up with a whole bunch of e research people, universities and whatnot. Suffice to say, there’s a lot going on in that space. They’re all hungry for compute and GPUs and inferencing capabilities, et cetera. 

And so that was pretty cool. Some good conversations there. There was a bloke who worked on the NASA Rover project as well, spoke to him and, I only asked him one question and that was. Forget about looking for water and life on Mars. What about the structures that already exist? He didn’t answer that question. 

And NASA’s not particularly forthcoming either. It’s case in point, the three I, Atlas Comet that’s been streaming through the universe. There’s photos of that they wanna release as well. That’s a different show altogether. I heard. 

it’s changing direction. Right? And the fact that, the silence is deafening. 

Mm-hmm. From the research community.  

Yep.  

Around what it actually could be, I think is very telling.  

That’s right. There’s all sorts of possible things going on there, but we digress. We are here with somebody else, of course. Who are we here with? Jono. 

I am really chuffed to be able to welcome a good friend of ours today, Matt Boon. 

Matt Boon is someone that Naran and I know really well. We’ve done a lot of work together. We’ve shared panels, we’ve done CIO round tables. And we’ve had the pleasure of watching, Matt command rooms full of IT executives. Yep. With great skill. And, I think Matt’s the guy in the industry that, people turn to when they need a bit of good perspective. 

Yep. And some may have even referred to Matt as an oracle of the I Australian, please. Okay. Okay. Let with that and look, with over 30 years of, advising boards and tech businesses, Matt’s things pretty simple. He’s passionate about turning insight into impact. He’s seen every hype cycle come and go, and I think Matt’s still the one that people call 

when they want to know what actually matters, when they don’t have time to watch our show. Right? So, and so don’t say too much about that. That’s right. And look. Tech Advisor to the Stars. Welcome Matt Boon, senior research director of IT at Adapt and host of Boon or Bust officially launching next year in January. 

That’s right. Yeah, in January. Fantastic. Welcome Matt.  

Great. Great to be here guys. Good to see you again. Yeah, great to see you. We do go back, rather a long way. We’ve seen a lot of things come and go, so it’s great to be able to sit here and chew the fat, so to speak, over some pretty meaty topics. We’ve got lined up today.  

Damn right. We’re gonna get right, stuck into it. Lemme just say this too, we’ve loved your events as well. Mm-hmm. Um, they’re always really well attended. I’m always. Wouldn’t say surprise, but just chuffed at all the people that turn up. Many of our customers as well. Everybody speaks really fondly of it. Mm-hmm. So, may that continue? 

Excellent. Thank you very much. I’m sure it will. 

Right now we are gonna get stuck into some topics here. The first of which we’re gonna call the tech layoffs and the people gap in people process and tools. There have been a great many layoffs around the place, Matt. I know you have some views on this. 

Should we believe that all businesses are now embracing generative AI and therefore it represents sound and efficient, rebalancing of workloads, or is there more going on? Specifically, we’ll note that, our friends at AWS have laid off 30,000 people as well. I think we want to get stuck into that. 

It’s not uncommon for us to talk about AWS on this podcast, Jono . I  

feel like it’s a bit of a thing.  

Well, indeed, possibly. It’s okay.    

 Anywho let’s get stuck into it, Matt. Okay. So what’s going on in the industry?  

Yeah. It’s kind of interesting at the moment. You mentioned obviously Gen AI and every organisation,  every customer I talk to is saying yes, we’re going down the AI path. 

All guns blazing kind of thing. The challenge I think many of them are facing right now is how do we justify the investments we need to make, you know, whether it’s in the AI tools or the technology to drive the AI tools. And unfortunately the kind of default, response right now is we can save costs, we can reduce head count. 

Mm-hmm. And they’re very much focusing, I think, on, on the low hanging fruit related productivity. And that’s driving a lot of these. Big layoffs. You mentioned AWS pretty much every company’s been doing it, so we Right. We could, we can assign that to pretty much any vendor name. You’re not implying that it’s unfair for  

me to call them out on this podcast. 

Not unfair. That’s right. 

But so we always say never throw, never throw stones right. In, uh, glass houses, um, but because you never know what’s coming next. But anyway, seriously. So I think that’s one of the reasons. But then we were talking earlier on as well, guys, about one of the other angles is that quite often in this industry and industry at large. 

We, we look for reasons to do things right, to justify things. Mm. And I think that a lot of organisations do have probably overinflated, um, employee bases. You know, we saw that happen through the pandemic and coming outta that, and you need a reason to be able to reduce head count. Many times it used to be quarterly results were bad, right? 

We’re laying off 5% of people, you know, four projections are bad. We’re laying off 5% of people. But now it’s like we’ve in, we’ve invested in AI. It’s reduced our, our need to have admin staff. It’s reduced our need to have call center staff so we can cut. Cut. Cut. And that’s an impact in the bottom line positively. 

So I think there’s a bit of that going on. Um, I would say also the challenge I see really heavily here as well, is that we’re trying to get our people, all of us, you know, to embrace AI for the good, for the better, good for the business and for our lives in general. But what this is now doing is really fueling negative perceptions. 

Around AI as a whole. Mm-hmm. You know, people in in employment are thinking, when am I gonna lose my job? Yes. Is AI good? Why should I embrace it? It’s gonna take my job away. So there’s quite a lot of different things going on at the moment around this as well.  

Mm-hmm. Very interesting. Do you think that perception’s being driven by, a mainstream sort of media narrative where negativity drives engagement? 

For some of those articles, do you think there’s a bit of a negative bias or do you think it’s fairly balanced?  

I think it’s a negative bias, right? Basically. I mean, if, if, if a newspaper reports that, you know, 10 companies have hired a thousand people, you know, all right, great. Um, five companies have sacked 30,000 people, bloody hell. 

You know, like, that’s really bad. So of course it’s, it’s driving that negative sentiment. ’cause that does sell newspapers, it promotes clicks, that kind of thing as well in terms of engagement with people in general. So I think there is definitely, that is fueling it a bit more as well. But I think also a real, um, almost desensitisation, in the workplace as well from the leadership level. 

Um, I think we’re seeing a lack of empathy in terms of what this really means, not just to the people who are impacted by these decisions, but those who are left behind. Yeah. You know, we always forget about those who are left behind and so you’ve got. Okay. 30,000 people at X, Y, Z vendor or whatever, or 10,000. 

Then you’ve got maybe a million people left behind or 120,000 staff left behind, whatever the number is, and they’re all sitting there. When am I next? You know, what’s the impact on me? Yes. You know, I’m sitting here one day with you, two, you know Naran and Jono, we’ve having a nice cup of coffee at work. 

Come in the next day, you know you’re not there. Why aren’t you there? You’ve got a 5:00 AM email saying your job’s gone and you’re locked out. Basically. Yeah. So how am I feeling? Do I really wanna work for this company? So I think how we, how we engage these decisions as well is critically important. 

That’s fascinating, isn’t it? Because, you said on one hand, you know, you mentioned that organisations are looking for a reason. But that’s a delicate balance. And if we look at Telstra and if we look at Commonwealth Bank, that’s a heck of a gamble with the optics, on what it looks like. And it’s a very emotive topic. 

You know, we all have bills to pay, we all have families. Yep. Most of us and we should be rightly worried about the future, and it’s a technology that is seemingly that disruptive. But equally we also know that not many businesses have properly embraced as well, right? Mm-hmm. And so if it is the, you know, it’s the great culling of staff due to all these back office efficiencies and otherwise, many businesses in Australia are yet to properly embrace the tech. 

So it can’t be both at the same time. Ys are right. I’m very skeptical  

over the narrative around. These huge numbers and sways of job cuts being directly linked to successful implementations of AI. Mm-hmm. Because the stats actually argue otherwise. Mm-hmm. 95% of AI projects are failing. Yep. Most of them are still in proof of concept phase. 

Yep. So, if that’s the case. What’s actually going on there? It’s a chicken and egg type. Absolutely. I agree  

with you. I think ’cause most organisations are struggling to build an AI strategy, um, let alone sort of, understand what the results or benefits can be from that. But I would say that in those sort of tasks, you know, you think about, a big research company, won’t mention names here, but. 

You know, they do an awful lot of say, secondary research, which needs people to go and source the content. That job is gone, right? Because that is a job gen AI can take over, right? You don’t need people gonna source find information that’s already out there that can be done, you know, call centers, those kind of areas as well. 

So that. When I talk about the low hanging fruit, it’s the kind of, the jobs which can easily be replaced by technology are the ones which are being impacted. But I think to your point as well, is that if you really wanna see the true benefits from AI, it needs to be, how is it, accelerating my revenue? 

How is it? Accelerating innovation. Mm. How has it helped me differentiate myself from the competition? We’re not seeing a lot of that happening. Right. Again, it’s coming back to, it’s really coming down to all things sort of productivity wise. So I absolutely agree with you that a lot of, organisations are struggling to get the true benefits from AI, and it comes back to what I said at the beginning. 

So as a result, they’re looking for easy ways to say, well, I’ve spent x billion dollars on all these AI capabilities. And I’ve sacked 20,000 people.  

We talk about this, a lot in terms of the difference between the easy thing and the right thing. Yeah. So, because sometimes the right thing is hard and we see this show up so much in tech across a lot of different, domain expertise, but obviously particularly with ai mm-hmm. 

Because it is hard to do well. It still is hard. We haven’t got to the point where it’s very easy yet.  

No, you’re right. I mean, I think there’s a classic sort of term which one my old CEOs used to use, and that was, you know, you do the right thing, right thing, the right things happen. And that holds true for companies as well. 

If they do the right thing, the right things will happen to them. But you know, how disingenuous is it? Whoever the organisation, particularly in the banking industry, okay, we’re, we’re laying off X percent of our workforce. Then two weeks later, you announce record profits.  

Yeah,  

I mean, so doing the right thing is that doing the right thing. 

And it comes back to what I said about leaving people behind. As a customer myself as well, I’m kind of like, well, hang on a minute. So you’re making these hard decisions and then you’re announcing record profits. So how disingenuous is that?  

Yep. So I mean, let’s look at the three hyperscalers. 

Let’s look at Microsoft, GCP, and AWS now, um. I’m of the view that all the profit for Amazon comes from AWS and I’ve researched that and looked into it. It seems to be relatively true, difficult to get absolute answers on that. And if we look at Microsoft’s journey, now their penetration with M365 in the workplace technology space has been phenomenal. 

Globally, I don’t think we’ve got a single customer that doesn’t use M365, like literally not one. Which is wild. Mm-hmm. It’s like every business and that’s true. Almost the world over. Um, and so success for Microsoft attaching copilot, there just has to be slight and it’s better than most. Mm-hmm. 

Right. And now I know they would like to see greater penetration and we see that with the KPIs and all the direction they’re giving their sales leaders, in Australia. And that’s okay. That makes perfect sense. But this idea that you can have a copilot that offers. Help across the way, but not with massive depth of context. 

You know, meeting summarisation and things of that nature. And I would say variable value and return on investment, depending on the product you are using. It’s an evolving story for Microsoft, like it is for everybody else. Mm-hmm. With Amazon, I wonder whether they’re playing catch up. Mm-hmm. Right. And I wonder what’s really behind the 30,000 layoffs there and is there more to it? 

Uh, it’s a, it’s a good question ’cause I, yeah, I absolutely agree with you. If you think about the fuel, the engine that’s really fueling Amazon. AWS is core to that. I mean, it’s, it’s kind of similar in many ways. You think about the old HP right? The HP print side fueled hp. Yes. Like that’s where the profit came from. 

That’s pretty similar with, uh, with AWS and Amazon as well. So you then, without going down a tangent, you could then ask yourself, at what point is Amazon gonna get rid of AWS Right, right. And spin it off potentially, you know? Right. Um, as, as we saw with hp. Interesting. I’m not saying that will happen, but just, uh, kind of putting it out there. 

But, so I think the, is there more that meets the eye? I think that ultimately. In terms of the whole cloud space in general, whether it’s AWS, um, you know, Microsoft, Google, you guys, whatever, you know, in terms of that space in general, there is a real rethink amongst customers in terms of how they assess the organisation, the vendors they’re doing with the hyperscalers. 

Yes. ’cause it’s kind of been, we’ve had that classic, you know, no one ever got fired for, for buying IBM. Right. No one ever got fired for buying AWS, but now there’s much more rethink happening in terms of who really is the best of breed. Yes. And that’s increasing pressure. You know, Google’s been playing catch up, left, right, and center, right? 

Yes. They’re kind of making roads into the data space, particularly to your point, Microsoft, um, has certainly what research that adapts has done shows that Microsoft, in terms of if organisations had a choice, increasingly would be the preferred vendor.  

Seems to be  

right. But. It comes back to it. It’s not always easy to shift from one to another. 

Yes. So there’s certainly that angle as well. I just think there’s a lot more questioning around expenditure on cloud in general, which I think is driving a much stronger and healthier competitive procurement environment. Yeah. And ultimately that’s gonna impact everybody in that whole ecosystem.  

I think, healthy competition is always good for consumers. 

We’ve spoken about this before around the state of the infrastructure as a service space, particularly as it relates to. Hyperscale consumption in our region. I haven’t done the numbers on other regions, but certainly over 75% of hyperscale consumption or cloud IaaS consumption in Australia, sits across Amazon and Azure. 

Yep.  

I’m not sure who’s actually in front at the moment? It was pretty even last year. But it’s fair to say that’s not a lot of choice mm-hmm. For consumers.  

Yeah. It’s a lot of choice. And also I think that, you know, the work we’ve also done at Adapt, we do an annual cloud migration study. 

And I’ll caveat this by saying much of this is aspirational rather than actual, but organisations that we’ve surveyed, there’s a much higher proportion right now who say they wanna repatriate workloads back. From the public cloud into on-premise environments or private cloud environments, simply because, the costs in this data-driven AI world are exponentially going through the roof, right? 

Which obviously is helping the hyperscalers, but the CFOs putting their hand up here saying like, what’s going on here? Our costs have gone up like 25%. Yeah. We’re not getting any greater tangible value from that. And they’re kind of really putting the brakes on. So we’re seeing a lot of pause and reflects happening in the market as well, which again comes back to driving that need for a much more competitive sort of environment amongst the hyperscale. 

Well, I think it’s great. You know, I think this sort of questioning around expenditure and questioning around the capabilities and value. It’s absolutely good for the customer and a long mate rain kind of thing. Yeah.  

Do you think customers, in light of the current, sort of economic climate where they’re under pressure in their own businesses themselves to reduce costs, are looking at their supply chain, particularly some of these big vendors and thinking about from a cultural alignment or values perspective, is this somebody I wanna be spending a lot of money with if they’re laying off these people? 

Or do you think people aren’t really. There’s no real connection.  

Yeah, it’s real. It’s real. I haven’t really thought about that one. It’s a great question. I think that organisations who are very people centric, particularly some of the not-for-profits, absolutely. They’d be looking at that thinking, you know, what’s going on here? 

Particularly those who are dealing with people who are struggling, um, out there in the workforce and that sort of thing as well. So there would be a degree of that. I think Jono, you know, ran, I think at the end of the day, it comes down to the bottom line, the CFO. If someone says, look, we’re not gonna go with, um, you know, Microsoft ’cause they’ve sacked 10,000 people, the CEO’s gonna, yeah, but I can save $10 million to go in Microsoft, so I don’t really care. 

Right. It is gonna come outta the bottom line end. No. Yeah, yeah. That’s right. So, well, I, I think that’s right too.  

It just, I think in terms of optics for our industry, and we are, we do seem to be a weird industry in the sense that these huge amounts of layoffs, particularly with North American tech vendors, is a cyclical thing and. 

I think you said maybe people are becoming a little bit numb to it.  

I think they are. But I just wanted to pick up on one thing you said there as well, because, I was reading, I think, in a Guardian this morning that we saw last month in October in the US we saw the, biggest number of layoffs since 2003. 

So think about that. The biggest month of layoff since 2003. Since 2003, we’ve had the global financial crisis, right? We’ve had, the pandemic yet. After that, we’re now seeing the biggest layoffs ever. So I think that’s a really more, more than  

the GFC 2009  

from a on a month basis, it was the biggest layoff in any month in, in any single month, any month since 2003, which is a pretty, um, significant number of the day. 

But what I wanted to say on that was when you talk about this, whether a layoff within whatever company, whether it’s a bank or a tech provider or whatever, coming back to what I said about those left behind, if you think about the number of people that are impacted. And the friends they have, the partners they have within that whole kind of environment as well. 

They’re the ones who, when they’re looking to sign off on a project, will think, hang on a minute, you know, my partner just lost their job and got an email at 5:00 AM. Telling them they’re locked out the company. Right. Yeah. I’m not gonna go with them. Yeah. So it is that left behind thing that these are things which are often not thought about. 

It’s not just the human impact, it’s the business impact that, you know what? I don’t wanna work with that company. That’s right.  

People do business with people. Absolutely. They do. Yeah. At the end of the day.  

Yeah.  

Look at how hard organisations have to work to build a positive working culture. 

I mean, what do they say? Culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? Yeah. And I know in our own business, Jono, I’m sure it’s true for yours as well, you put so much effort into culture. Right. And it doesn’t take a lot to really disrupt that. And, you know, you want to, you wanna go to work, you wanna feel good, you wanna feel safe, and you wanna feel like you’ve got a future and you can make a difference. 

Mm-hmm. Um, so yeah, I get it right. I mean, I, I don’t wanna work for a business that’s making decisions and frankly, getting it wrong too. You know, like if. And I don’t wanna name them again. It’s like, it’s one thing to spin off a generative AI project, lay people off to then to have the project not work as well. 

Mm-hmm. The shame. Yeah. At the very least, your project should work, right? If you’re gonna do the wrong thing for god’s sake, demonstrate that you’re a competent technology vendor. Yeah, right. Exactly.  

But also the, um, come back to, you know what we’re talking about as well, like the, I can’t remember which company it was one of the banks here in Australia. 

Um, they put someone in place to, to develop their AI customer service strategy and 27  

year veteran actually. Yeah. 20.  

Exactly. 27 year veteran. That’s right. And, uh, so she built it all, did herself outta a job, got sacked, you know? Mm-hmm. So what, what sort of message is that telling people and the project didn’t work. 

I know. You know? Yeah. Anyway.  

Yeah. Good times. Well look, a couple of Australian specific trends here. Yeah. Um, so I just, uh, I’m gonna read these out. So what have we got here? Um, startup layoffs affected front end engineers. Content heavy growth teams, government tech initiative continue to hire, but they favor. 

Non headcount. So contractors, hybrid skill professionals, cloud transformation projects. And I know digital transformation is a, is an interest of yours, Matt, are driving demand for security and data engineers, but they’re pushing out roles tied to legacy systems. So if we sort of summarize what’s going on here, there are possibly a recalibration of headcount. 

We know that there’s, we spoke on the last podcast, something like 130,000, shortages of tech skills. We’ve got. Layoffs happening at the same time as well. It’s all happening mm-hmm. In parallel. Mm-hmm. What do we make of it all?  

Yeah. It’s interesting. So you mentioned the digital transformation mode. 

How many minutes in are we? But we got in there. You got 30 seconds. We triggered you. You’ve got 30. It’s funny on that though, because I was on doing round table a few weeks ago and about 25 minutes in, one of the guys said, my God. And I said, what everyone, what? He said, 25 minutes. 

And I’m moderating said. 25 minutes. What, before anyone mentioned AI, so same with digital transformation. Pretty good. Yeah. But the thing with digital transformation is at the end of the day, if you look, I think there’s a report by, might have been KPMG or Deloitte, but it said the number one thing that keeps CEOs awake at night in Australia. 

Is showing value from their digital transformation project. Sure. ’cause um, we’re really struggling to see the value from that. Mm-hmm. But you, you brought up the, the legacy word there as well. ’cause digital tra and you mentioned culture earlier. It was Simeon Preston, who was the Group CIO at Bupa a few years ago, and he said the biggest, part of our digital transformation was the people. 

Hmm. Okay. So it wasn’t the tech. It wasn’t investment, it was getting the people on board. So driving the culture. So when you mention the word legacy, it’s not just about the technology which is holding us back, it’s about the mindsets, it’s about the culture, it’s about the people. Yes. We have to get the people on board to truly succeed in digital transformation in many ways. 

Yes. And I think you, you asked me the question earlier on as well, in terms of. You know, I’ve been throwing so much money at digital transformation. It, it’s not a digital transformation is given. Right. It’s just what we do now. It, it’s not necessarily something we think we must digitally transformer just doing it and modernisation is the same thing. 

And you, you said to me, if we’ve been modernizing for so long, so many years. Why have we still got Legacy Challenge? Mm. I love it’s be it’s because we think it’s an end. It’s an end game. There is no end game to modernisation. No. It’s a constant,  

it’s a hamster wheel. Absolutely. That’s right. That’s what it is. 

And when I walk into a meeting with CEOs and I say, oh, we want to modernise, you know, we’ve got a three year modernisation journey. And I’m like, no, you haven’t. You need to have a 25 year modernisation. It’s never ending at the end of it. I  

think that mindset is something really worth, just double clicking on because, and I know Naran deals with this as well. 

It’s so common for me to walk into a business and the primary objective is to overcome some kind of legacy or technical debt. We call it technical debt. Yep. So you’ve got old stuff that you should have sorted out and you haven’t, and now you’ve got a bigger problem. This is a really common cycle and I do wonder what it is that’s holding. 

Organisations back from making sure that they don’t accumulate that technical debt. Mm-hmm. Because the cost to actually do one, do a project when it, if you wait too long, I’m sure you’ve got some views on the numbers. Yeah. But I feel like it’s, you know, five times more than actually having just done it at the, when it was easier. 

Mm-hmm. Well,  

I think going back to your point on the, on the people end of it. If you leave it too long, how different is the end user experience resulting from the change? Could be like a 20 year difference, right? In technology and the people process. Part of that is significant. Case in point, embracing generative ai. 

I remember, you know, particular vendors that turned this stuff on and realised that a whole bunch of confidential documents were harvested and then became immediately accessible to everyone. Came up Yes. Had a round table with like 12 CISOs that came out there. Okay. That’s still happening,  

right? And so in order to change that end users have to be comfortable and competent at tagging relevant assets and artifacts, which might seem innocuous, but if you dare to interrupt a working. 

Like a working culture of somebody or working habit is probably a better way to describe it. Good luck to you. Mm-hmm. Right. ’cause we’re difficult people to change. Yeah,  

that’s right. Exactly right. It’s hard and when you’re both talking, two words come to my mind, right? Two words. 

Short termism. Yeah. Right. The sort of average tenure of the CIO, what is it, three years?  

That, that pretty much lines up with, that’s what,  

that’s what they’re focused on. They’re focused on the next three years. It’s like our political environment. Yeah. We don’t get things done for the long term good of the company because we’re focused on three years. 

I’d love to get your thoughts on this. I’ve been toying with this idea for a while. So here it is. I’ll lay it on you. I, and I dunno if any boards, are pushing this down to the execs, but executives of companies who are making these decisions. If there was a balanced scorecard that included a KPI around accumulation of technical debt, I wonder what kind of behavior that might drive. 

It would drive the behavior we need. Right. I think it might be the end of that. That’s right. Yeah.  

Because I’m thinking if I’m running a business, this is a huge deal. Has anyone made the connection with doing a project now or delaying your refresh or delaying the technology shift in the market? 

Because that makes it easier to. Yeah, it’s just a lever that you have to drive bottom line performance. Mm-hmm. Or ripping the bandaid off and getting it done now, because it’ll cost me less if I do it now. Mm-hmm.  

That I don’t, I’m not sure how many companies are really. Making the link.  

I don’t think I, I think it does to your point around, if there were KPIs, not just for the CIO but for the CEO and indeed the board, right. 

Terms, CFO, carrying risk. Who exactly. Well,  

the risk just accumulates and amplifies. It does because we,  

we saw that with, you know, obviously this increased focus on. Governance and compliance. Things like essential eight and stocking, all that kind of stuff, and talking to CISOs. It was probably about 12 months ago, I had about 20 in a room and we were talking and I said, all this governance and compliance stuff, you know, is it holding your back? 

Do you hate it? And they said, we love it. I said, what do you mean you love it? It’s impacting the board. As soon as things impact the board, stuff gets done. Right? Mm-hmm. And that, to your point, make them somewhat responsible, you know, because ultimately the board is, I not, I don’t wanna pick on a board here, everybody, by the way, but the, the board generally, they’re, they’re in place for a lot longer than a CIO is. 

That’s true. Quite often, at least some of those members of that board. So at what point do, do they need to carry some of the can on these decisions? ’cause all the CIO’s thinking about is, yeah, I’m gonna be here for three years. I’ll get some great wins now, then go do it all again somewhere else. Right 

Yeah, that’s right. Takes me back to when I used to work for, um, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and I remember when the credit crisis kicked in. The only projects that got a look in were compliance or regulatory projects. Yep. That was it. And to your point, the IT teams were like, great. I mean, we will keep a job because of that. 

Yep. Right. If it wasn’t for that, any of the nice to have projects, including the one that I was running for the bank at the time were deemed unnecessary. Now thankfully for me, Royal Bank of Scotland got in trouble, had to divest its insurance business, so was born direct line group, and I managed to work on that project for five years thereafter. 

So, you know, every cloud silver lining, good time, silver lining. That’s right.  

Silver linings. Matt, if you could change one thing overnight in Australian enterprise it, that would have a huge impact on the speed with which organisations can modernise and adopt new technology. What would it be?  

There’s a lot more than one there, Jono. 

But, um, what I would say, I think really, you know, I don’t wanna bang on the short termism thing, but taking that long term view. But I think secondly it, it’s really bringing it back to what’s in it for the people. That technology, decision or investment is gonna impact? What’s the positive, benefit they’re gonna get from that as well? 

Because I think for many, again, it does come back to the financial bottom line, or it comes back to how we can, you know, be more efficient. But so many projects fail, not just because they’re not, ’cause they’re necessarily the wrong project or the wrong we’re doing the wrong thing. It’s because they haven’t, articulated what the true benefit of those. 

Projects are gonna be to people within the organisation. At the end of the day. It comes back to that, that people and culture piece at the end of the day as well, really being critical to that as well. So that would kind of be one area, I think, but also it’s just kind of, really start thinking beyond, typical approaches to tech projects. 

You know, we do X, Y, and Z ’cause it’s going to deliver A, B, C from an ROI point of view. I think ROI, from my own point of view, I think ROI as a a value metric is dead. Hm. Right. It needs to be about ROV, like return on value and value needs to be, not necessarily value to the business, but value to the people within the business. 

Sorry, you got me off on a ran there. All right. I like this. We’ve just launched something. There’s a new industry. Ladies, gentlemen. ROV. You heard it here first.  

I can get on board with that,  

but also like in the Sure. Coming back to the cloud conversation in, in a sort of cloud environment. 

Generally speaking, you know, old measures like TCO, like ROI are not fit for purpose, right? Because they’re, they’ve kind of got this ongoing cost, this ongoing need to modernise and you can’t say we’ve got a three year focus on this. Coming back to your point, what’s holding us back from modernizing legacy is that we think in three year sprints. 

And that’s holding us back.  

Yeah. I think that’s still driven from the way that even accounting standards and the way you, capitalise assets and the whole cycle is built on those, frameworks as a foundation. And perhaps they haven’t really caught up with the pace of innovation in modern, IT certainly, 

AI’s gonna disrupt that again. I think it is. And I, and  

also, I mean, across the board, we talk a lot about the need to improve digital savviness or digital awareness within leadership teams and boards. That’s kind of a given, but from a technology, um, leadership point of view, to truly be successful, we need to understand the business. 

Right. We need to help understand the business so we can have the right conversation up and down the organisation. ’cause you know, again, talking to organisations, I, I have this other term, you like my terms that I come out, let’s, right, let’s go. We’re ready. Um, there’s, uh, is we use this kind of term airline magazine management, right? 

So the board members on QF one, reading the Qantas magazine, AI come back, we gotta do AI. So coming back to what you were saying earlier on. Everyone’s scrambling around. He’s told us we’ve gotta do AI. So they start throwing money at it. Yeah. And this is what we’re seeing, right? Seriously. Right now, the serious side of this is they throw money at left front center. 

Then a year later they’re like, we need a strategy. So CIOs in Australia right now have spent millions on AI. Number three, number four priority for the next year mm-hmm. Is build an AI strategy. Mm-hmm. So it’s kind of, it’s that classic airline magazine management moment. Right. Ah, that’s great.  

Okay, Matt, great conversation. 

We are going to hit you with our quickfire three now.  

Oh. Shall I be nervous? 

I, well, I’m not sure. I think you’ll be fine. Naran’s gonna go first.  

Alright, so you need to cast your mind back here. Okay. You need to think about young Matt. Bless him last week. Right? Well look, I don’t know how far that, it wasn’t that long ago. 

Sure. Let’s say young Matt. Young Matt. Okay. Alright. So what’s one piece of advice you would give your past self before taking on a major tech initiative or challenge?  

Don’t believe that technology is the answer to all the problems.  

How dare you.  

Blasphemy. No phe. I reckon that it’s gonna get edited out, right? 

The point there is somebody’s picking the wrong tech. Nah, we’ll leave it in. We’ll leave it in. Tech technology is an enabler, right? I mean, for many sort of organisations, we AI’s the case in point with technology, right? It’s often we, it’s technology looking for a problem. Mm. But we gotta understand what the problem is. 

And quite often it comes back to what we’ve been talking about, the people side of things, right? In terms of, so understand what the problem is, understand what value we’re trying to drive. And how can technology actually help us with this? Because a tech, you know, we talk about having a tech first mindset, yes, that’s important, but you gotta have a why first mindset you do, right? 

And then technology leads into that  

a hundred percent.  

Yeah.  

Great answer. Great answer, answer bla for me, but great answer. Oh look, that’s fine. Look, we have to accept, I  

mean, tech for technology’s sake. That’s right, exactly. That’s right.  

I think very good advice. Matt, what’s something that you used to believe in in leadership that you. 

No longer do. You’ve been around for a while.  

So leadership in general, what I used to believe in, yeah. I used to believe in that leadership broadly was, about the people within the organisation. I think that, for many, that’s how they kind of approached it. I’m not saying that isn’t the case anymore, but I think we’ve got a real. 

Risk where businesses leaders are becoming desensitised to things. And we talk the talk about being people first, but we’re not walking the walk at the end of the day. So I think that kinda long-winded answer there, but I would absolutely say that, I think that we’ve lost sight of what leadership really means. 

You know, I’ve been a manager of big global teams over my career at Gartner and other places, and my measure of personal success as a leader is not how well I’m doing. Is how all my people are doing. Mm-hmm. Right? If my people succeed. I’m succeeding. Right. But I think there’s too many, leaders right now are just focused on themselves and demonstrating what they’re doing at the expense of others. 

Right. You got me on another rant there, so there we go. No, that’s good.  

Well, we invented a new term the other day. We call it rant casting. Right? Like that’s what we’re all about. Trade. Trade. Exactly. Alright, very good. Okay,  

return on rant. There’s a new one. Return on rant, return on rent. 

Okay. I like it. I do. We’ll incorporate it into our things reason strategy document. I think we need one. Yeah, we need to  

publish our terms. We’ll do that. Alright, so third and final question here. What’s your gut check for spotting a good partner and importantly walking away from a bad one?  

Good question. 

What’s my gut check on that? I would say that. A good partner is willing to fail when you fail. Hmm. And what I mean by that is really having true skin in the game. Right. I think when you’re working with technology providers as partners, particularly, very happy to celebrate the successes and say how great we are and here’s great wins. 

But quite often, you know, things don’t go smoothly. And I think a good partner takes the knocks. Um, as well as the wins, right? Yeah. And is there with them. And I think that doesn’t even need to be sort of built into contracts, but it needs to be built into the culture and Absolutely. You know, when I’m talking to organisations, that’s what they’re saying to be more and more now. 

They want best of breed relationships where there’s skin in the game, there’s mutual trust and have we fail, a partner fails with us and they help us then succeed, recover after that. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s right. In  

the face of adversity, how do you show up? Absolutely.  

Yeah. Such simple, great advice. 

That, that, and just to double down on that, you obviously talked to a lot of people who are doing this well, people who perhaps are making mistakes and learning from them. Are there any simple strategies or effective strategies that you’ve seen organisations, deploy when engaging a technology partner that drives that, that shared risk or that skin in the game? 

I, it is fairly, I think it’s fairly simple right at the outset, and that is understand the business. Mm-hmm. Understand who you’re dealing with. Do your homework to recognize, you know, where are they focused, where have they had the challenges, that sort of thing as well. So already know your customer. 

I think also as well, I’m not, don’t wanna get sort of bang on about the whole short-termism. Many technology vendors, are looking for short term win, short term engagement. I’ve got a widget. A hundred thousand dollars. Thank you. See you later. Alright. But it has to be, okay. What’s your long term goal? 

And I use this term as well, which in a, it’s in a book by these guys called Dan and Chip Heath, which is called Switch. And they have this concept of the destination postcard. Right. So if you think about the, if a partner thinks about the organisation it’s dealing with, what is that organisation’s destination, right? 

Mm-hmm. Where are they actually trying to get to? So understand what that is, but then come in and think about, alright, if that’s their destination as an organisation, how do we help? Um. You know, identify and build the stops along the way to that destination, and then work across the organisation with the stakeholders at each of those destinations to align them together to ultimately reach the org, reach the organisational destination postcard. 

Yeah, great advice. Great advice. I love that. We have spoken in the past to about it being appropriate and fine to be a little bit vulnerable. I mean, if nothing else, it gives you an out. And I know within our own business, if we get asked to do something that’s new and innovative and we haven’t done it before, for the love of God, just say so. 

Mm-hmm. Just say it. Not done this before, but I’m gonna bring 10 other people along who have the skills to do it. Mm-hmm. And the history and the background, and certainly the aptitude and the inspiration to take it on. And we’re gonna deliver you an outcome anyway, but we’re doing it for the first time and there may be some bumps along the way. 

I can’t remember the time when a customer didn’t appreciate that.  

And I think the thing is to that point is that if we don’t do more of that, our ability as a nation to innovate is gonna continue to flatline, right? We’re currently, the global innovation came, index came out last in October, and Australia this year ranked at 23. 

Last year it was 24. Mm-hmm. So, hooray. We’ve moved that one point. Right. But from an innovation point of view, we continue to lag. And I think what you’re saying there, Marran, is that if we can collectively think differently Yeah. Be vulnerable. Yeah. Think about different approaches. That’s the only way we’re gonna uplift Australia’s ability to innovate on the global stage. 

I heartedly agree.  

Yeah. And I think it’s up to professionals in our industry to take that approach in a homegrown fashion. Because if you’re passive other nations are gonna, impose their agenda on our business. Yep. And that also, I think we see a lot of that. I  

think we don’t, but that needs to be driven from the top as well. 

You know? ’cause the CEO of whatever tech company, they’re not walking into CBA, know what they might do if it’s big enough, but they’re not walking to CBA, but they need to the people who. Are walking in there need to feel empowered. Yes. To be vulnerable. Yes. Right. Because culturally, within most organisations, vulnerability is weakness. 

Whereas I think what you are saying here, vulnerability can actually be an opportunity. Right. It’s power. Strength, it’s power. Yeah. Absolutely.  

I don’t think you can innovate without making some mistakes. Sure, yeah. The, it’s gonna happen. I was watching Elon Musk talk about the launch of SpaceX, new Falcon Rocket, but everyone talked about how amazing that was and it. 

You know, it landed, did all the right things. But he was saying no one talks about how many we blew up before. Yeah, exactly. To get there. That’s right. So that’s right. I thought that was, you know, I thought that was a good take. I think that’s right. The freedom and vulnerability to make a few mistakes. 

If you want to innovate,  

it’s a lot easier to do that when you just get an $878 billion paycheck though, isn’t it? Blow a few rockets up, but they’re  

spectacular if nothing else. Exactly. When it does fail. Yep. Matt, that’s a great conversation. Fantastic insights on the quickfire three. We really appreciate it. 

That was things reasons. Thank you for listening. That’s great to be here,  

Jono. Thank you. Thank you. And good luck with your podcast, Matt Boon. We will of course, promote it when it comes out. Looking forward to it.  

Excellent. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks guys. Safe. Keep an eye out everybody. 

Matt Boon. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Now will you  

just do a quick readout and then we’re perfect? Yep. 

Alrightyy ru. That’s been things, reasons, what a fantastic conversation with Matt. Thoroughly enjoyed that. I hope our audience, that’s you. You sat there and you enjoyed it, just like I said that you would. 

Amazing conversation.  

Great conversation. Really looking forward to catching up with Matt again.  

Yep.  

And keeping an eye out for his podcast as well. Absolutely. I think we’ll include some links or something in the, I think so. The post edits and people will do something.  

Yes, they will. We have people that do things. 

That’s right. People do things for reasons. For reasons.  

That’s right. And everybody, you know where to find your podcast. It’s wherever you get them. Could be Apple Podcasts. Could be Spotify, could be YouTube. We are of course, produced by Pru Loon. Our digital producer is Karina Aguilera, and you can find us at pru@thingsreasons.show we are everywhere. Keep an eye out. Thank you for listening. See you next time.  

Thank you. See ya.