Author: Events Team

Rob James, Chief Technology Officer at Qantas, delivered a presentation around how technology is shaping the future of aviation.

Some of the points covered during the presentation were:

• The challenges that are faced by airlines today and how to react to it
• The ever-changing face of technology and customer expectations
• Operational efficiencies through technology and what the future what might look like

ABOUT ROB JAMES
Rob James is the Group Chief Technology Officer for Qantas, one of Australia’s largest brands and one of the biggest airlines in the world. Rob is responsible for the technology strategy and architecture for the Qantas group of companies which includes international, domestic, engineering, freight and catering. Prior to this, Rob James was the CIO for William Hill Australia for 4 years, which is one of the largest gaming and sports wagering organisations in the world. Rob built the technology team from 40 to over 250 staff across 5 geographic locations and also included product development with a revenue growth accountability of over $80mil per year. Previously, Rob was the CTO of Echo Entertainment, which owns and operates 4 casino properties in Australia. He has also worked with a series of Start-Ups including Posse.com, Spacio.us and Museek.com where he drove the engineering and product development teams. This included a successful IP sale to Cisco and acquisition to Global One Publishing. Rob has over 20 years of experience in technology innovation and currently sits on advisory boards for several technology start-ups.

Sara Drakeford, IT Director Asia Pacific, Hallmark Cards Australia presented “Our digital transformation journey – modernising a traditional FMCG organisation.”

In this session, Sarah and the audience navigated through the digital transformation journey undertaken by a traditional industry with a legacy technology landscape that evolved organically over 20+ years, in a business that is a subsidiary of a multi-national organisation and needs to work within a constrained framework. The case study covered where the company started and why, who we started with, the success rate – how do the company knows they made the right choice and succeeded when the statistics everywhere tell of a failure rate upwards of 80%? What was learned? Where to next?

Stage 1 of the journey is on the precipice of go-live. There is nothing more valuable than tapping into the knowledge and experiences of peers and in that context, Sara initiated a discussion – what would you have chosen? What would you choose next? Why? And explored alternative ways of working through a similar journey.

ABOUT SARA DRAKEFORD
Sara is an experienced IT leader who has headed up IT functions in national and international organisations over 20 years with specific experience in the digital transformation journey primarily in the travel industry and more recently the FMCG space. Her strengths are in simplifying complexity and the delivery of organisational efficiencies primarily via business process improvement with technology aiding rather than leading the change.

Dave Shephard, Vice President APAC, and Wayne Phillips, Solutions Engineer at Bitglass, discussed around Practicing safe SAAS.

With the adoption of Cloud, corporate data is moving beyond the firewall and introduces new risks and threats to an organization. And with more Enterprises embracing BYOD the Endpoint is increasingly unmanaged. These IT shifts mean Businesses can no longer rely on traditional security tools that they’ve placed trust in up to now.

A new strategy is required, one that provides data & threat protection for any application, on any device, from anywhere. Join Bitglass in this workshop where they will be discussing common Cloud security challenges and demonstrating a range of high-value Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) use-cases that will deliver almost immediate value.

ABOUT DAVE SHEPHARD
Dave joined Bitglass in October 2017 to oversee growth plans across Asia Pacific and Japan. Bitglass helps enterprises of all sizes to secure their data when its outside of the firewall; often in public cloud applications and being accessed from unmanaged or BYO/mobile devices.  Founded in 2012 and Headquartered in Silicon Valley, the company has more than 300 customers and 125 employees. Bitglass is privately owned and has raised more than $85m across three funding rounds.

ABOUT WAYNE PHILLIPS
As a Technical Director I’m responsible for Technology Partnerships, Business Development, Account Management and Technical Direction for Matrix42’s Mobility and Security products. I’ve held management positions in disruptive start-up vendors and established IT vendors. I’m a full stack CTO.

Vasant Kumar, Regional Customer Success Manager at Micro Focus, and Stephen Kho, Managing Principal, Cyber Security Services at Micro Focus, presented the session “3 Pillars for Building an Intelligent cyber incident response centre – Accuracy, Efficiency and Effectiveness.”

The main objective of the session was to drive a conversation with the CIO/CISO’s around how can they effectively build intelligent and scalable security operations. With most organizations choosing to setup their security operations, it has now become imperative that Security organization within an enterprise are making effective use of their SOC by incorporating solutions that help build upon the areas of Security operations ranging from Analytics to Orchestration and Automation. The topic also touched upon a key aspect of the lack of skilled resources in the area of Cyber Security operations and how to address these challenges.

ABOUT VASANT KUMAR
Vasant’s key responsibility is to ensure that existing security customers in the region are successful with their investments that they have currently made with MicroFocus Security solutions and help them effectively utilize them. His skills primarily focus around the areas of product adoption and support.

ABOUT STEPHEN KHO
Stephen is a security professional with 14 years of security industry experience across multiple business sectors including the financial and telecommunications industries. His knowledge in the areas of penetration testing, security technologies and risk management is extensive; arising from his network engineering, security consultancy and hands on penetration testing background. Stephen engages with his team, clients and all stakeholders by way of a well-developed set of soft skills, which complements his strong technical knowledge base to deliver effective and consistent security services. He has a proven track record of building, mentoring and delivering both commercial consultancy teams as well as internally facing security organisations. He achieved this by combining his in-depth technical skill set and business acumen with effective people management skills. In his current role as CISO program manager, he provides Information Security leadership and vision through the continued development and implementation of the enterprise information security program designed to protect the enterprise mission critical IT system, information and processes against potential threats. In addition to strong experience in operational management, information assurance and developing consultancy services, Stephen has particular expertise in the design and analysis of networks to facilitate the development of secure infrastructures with a focus on GRX, 4G LTE, VoIP, multi-tier application and ICS/Process Control Domain architecture. Stephen’s current research is focussed on the area of GRX (GPRS Roaming eXchange) networks security and recently presented at the Hack In The Box Security Conference 2014 in Amsterdam.

During his session, Simon Reiter, Head of Business Transformation & Technology at Defence Health, answered the question: Is using AI in the insurance industry ethical?

We all understand that AI brings many benefits with automating manual tasks, Health Insurers are under pressure to reduce our operational costs to drive affordability for Australians. To do this, we are exploring where emerging technology can help, particularly AI and examining the ethical questions this raises when we look at taking away decision making away from humans and hand them over to a computer.

ABOUT SIMON REITER
Operating at the CIO level and reporting directly to the COO. Responsible for leading the organistions Business Transformation & technology functions from a strategic level. With a strong focus on innovation to support organisational growth and efficiencies through the adoption of industry best practice technologies that enhance our members engagement and customer experience.

During his session, Michael Donath, Chief Digital Officer/Chief Information Officer at IKEA, gave an overview of the company’s journey to modern retailing moving from many legacy systems to a relevant customer experience.

ABOUT MICHAEL DONATH
Michael Donath leads IKEA’s multichannel transformation in Australia. Looking after expansion planning, new store formats, eCommerce, Web & Digital as well as Multichannel initiatives, Michael’s role will transform IKEA into a retailer that supports customers across all channels and provides a great shopping experience wherever and whenever a customer engages with IKEA. Michael has had broad experience in IKEA covering Logistics, Store Operations and Projects as well as a background in Manufacturing and Wholesale.

Johmar Gazo, Former Divisional Chief Information Officer at a Leading Financial Services Organisation presented on Transforming the technology workforce.

To execute an aligned business and technology strategy, the ability to bring the technology workforce on the change journey is critical to success.

During his session, Johmar covered the following key topics through his experiences:

• Placing the customer and colleague front and centre.
• Diversity in the workforce, and the benefits of different disciplines and perspectives.
• Creating a culture and ways of working for retaining and attracting technology talent.

ABOUT JOHMAR GAZO
Johmar is a proven technology leader with over 20 years of experience in designing and leading business technology transformations, building high performing leaders and teams, and delivering value. Johmar has held several divisional CIO roles in the CBA and NAB. During his tenure at NAB, he held the positions of divisional CIO for the Consumer Bank, Business Bank, Wealth, and Digital. Prior to NAB, Johmar spent 10 years in various technology executive roles in the CBA, including the role of CIO for the Commonwealth Bank, Indonesia, and several General Manager of Technology roles within the Retail Bank and International Financial Services divisions. Before joining the Banking industry, Johmar worked in Accenture as a management consultant within the technology domain for clients including Westpac, NAB, AMP, and Standard Chartered Bank (Asia). Johmar started his career at IBM as a software engineer, graduating from the University of Technology with a degree in Computer Science. Johmar now uses this experience to help organisations, leaders and teams deliver greater value through the improved performance of their technology, strategy, governance, delivery and teams.

Andy Fell, Founder at GiFT631 heads up an all-star panel at this year’s CIO/CISO Leaders Summit including:

Cameron McLean, Chief Information Officer, Yarra Valley Water
Travers Stow, Chief Information Officer, Sigma Healthcare
Simon Dalli, Head of Security and Compliance, Target Australia
Paul Oppenheimer, Chief Information Officer, RMIT University

These leading CIO’s took on the discussion to the never-ending Digital journey. Start-ups are using new technologies to disrupt industries of all types & changing the way customers think. They are able to disrupt industries overnight. With Disruption at the forefront of most businesses, it is critical for CIOs to lead their organizations in a way that make them as agile as their competitors.

A few questions were covered during the panel including:

Should CIOs disrupt before they are disrupted?
What are the next steps in this Digital Journey?
What lessons have we learned?

ABOUT ANDY FELL
After 20 in senior leadership, including being the GM of the St.George Retail Bank & then Westpac Premium, Andy left his corporate life to follow his passion and set up GiFT631. This four pillared learning business which centres on: Conference/keynote speaking & MC work
1:1 coaching, Offsite facilitation and business consultation, Leadership/talent development programmes, masterclasses and seminars. Andy lives the quote ‘do what you love and love what you do.’

ABOUT CAMERON MCLEAN
With a passion for leadership and business transformation, I have over 20 years experience in delivering complex technology and business change for a organisations in a number of geographies. I have worked with Executive teams and Boards, and have a proven track record of large scale delivery. Building high performing teams and providing the leadership to enable people to achieve amazing things gives me my greatest professional reward. Most recently I was the CTO and then General Manager of SecurePay, a subsidiary of Australia Post. As well as providing secure on-line payments, SecurePay owns POLi Payments.

ABOUT TRAVERS STOW
Travers Stow graduated as a physiotherapist in 1981, spending 13 years in private practice specialising in orthopaedics and sports injuries. After completing an MBA in 1994, he made a career transition to corporate management, initially in bureau based mainframe cost accounting and payroll computer systems, before joining Perpetual Trustee Company in 2000 to integrate a newly acquired master trust superannuation business. In 2004, Travers joined Australian Unity initially as the Group Executive for Retail Services, later adding the Business Technology role to his portfolio. In 2009, Travers moved to Transurban Group as Chief Information Officer, responsible for technology across the Group’s corporate and tolling systems, overseeing the successful completion of a major new tolling system replacement project on Citylink in 2011. 2013 marked the beginning of two years at Energy Australia as General Manager Retail Technology, responsible for stabilising a new billing system implementation and completion of the acquisition and transfer of Ausgrid’s retail business. In late 2015, Travers took on the role of Project Director for Medibank’s Finance, Procurement and HR payroll systems replacement, leaving at the successful completion of systems integration testing to take up his present role as Chief Information Officer for Sigma Healthcare.

ABOUT PAUL OPPENHEIMER
Paul Oppenheimer is a leader with a proven track record in developing strategy, managing operations and guiding teams to deliver valued outcomes for customers. He is skilled in the design of both tactical and strategic capability roadmaps and has a deep background in technology and digital developments that will disrupt current operating models in the market. Paul has a 17 year executive management background that includes senior stakeholder engagement, business strategy execution, team building, portfolio management, program delivery, change management and process improvement experience. Prior to RMIT, Paul worked at Accenture where he was responsible for the execution of a Business Transformation Program across operations, banking and non-banking streams. He has also held previous roles with the ANZ Bank – in Australia within the Personal and Technology Infrastructure divisions, as well as in Singapore where he managed a wide range of technology and operational responsibilities for the Asia, Pacific, Europe and America division of the bank. In between time, Paul has also started his own mobile technology company.

Scott Jendra, Chief Information Officer, AFL opens up this year’s CIO/CISO Leaders summit with a strong presentation on Innovation and challenges. What it takes to deliver Australia’s leading digital sport.

In this session, Scott discussed the latest innovations in digital, mobile and streaming from the team at AFL as they work closely with Telstra to serve more than 4m passionate fans every month. The most common challenges and lessons were presented given the attendees’ examples to take into their own organisation.

ABOUT SCOTT JENDRA
Scott has 20 years experience across digital, technology and strategy at AFL, SEEK, The Boston Consulting Group and Accenture, including working for 20 of the largest Australian companies and public sector agencies. He helps organisations in times of change and growth to achieve their business outcomes. To accomplish this he works closely with the business to put technology strategy into simple terms along with the commercial trade-offs, and with technologists to ensure they understand business priorities and focus on the highest value initiatives. He has a passion for people and building high-performing teams, awarded for his people management and mentoring skills within BCG and has directly managed operational teams of between 30 to 200 people. He also has an entrepreneurial side and is the creator of PPT Productivity product suite.