The iTnews Podcast

This week iTnews speaks with Robert Lopez, Chief Marketing and Innovation Officer at Norths Collective.

iTnews speaks with Sherrie Killiby, Executive Director, Strategy & Engagement at Transport for NSW.

This week we speak with Sandip Kumar, who’s the Executive Director of Transformation, about what digital transformation looks like in Australian healthcare, and his direct operations.

iTnews speaks with SBS CTO Darren Farnham about the media organisation's tech strategy, strategic pillars, and a recent CMS overhaul.

This is a repeat of one of our most popular episodes — we'll have the rest of Season 3 for you soon! Our guest this week is John Cox, the CTO of Coles Group. There’s a lot of interesting things happening at Coles, including an in-progress shift to an events-based architecture. This has wide-ranging use cases, from in-store replenishment and reducing out-of-stocks on ecommerce orders, to anticipating customer service and listing next-best actions for team members. We also discuss the Group’s IT strategy, and why adoption of cloud services is not a specific strategic pillar.

This week, iTnews speaks with Douugh Founder and CEO Andy Taylor about the fintech's future plans — and how it intends to help bring financial education into its user experience.

iTnews speaks with Dale Hurley, Founder and Chief Digital Officer at Avenue Bank, one of Australia's newest banks about its current operations under a Restricted Authorised Deposit-taking Institution licence — and what the future holds.

iTnews spoke with Westpac's CTO David Walker to learn more about the bank's recent AI coding experiment.

This week iTnews speaks with the leader of NAB's Technology & Enterprise Operations Leadership Team and acting CIO of Personal Bank Paul Norman.

As Australia's largest online pet supply store, Pet Circle is investing heavily in technology, including most recently to support a trial of fully-owned last-mile delivery services in Perth, as well as in digital systems that make it easier to interface with courier partners elsewhere in Australia, and specifically to have more visibility into its supply chain. Some of this work has involved uplifting an existing Google Cloud Platform environment to track data on a “per customer order” basis. Behind the scenes, the company is also embracing infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and automation to increase velocity and speed-to-value.

La Trobe University's Director of Data & Analytics Anthony Perera leads a data and analytics centre of excellence that brings together data, analytics and data science operations that previously existed as distributed “pockets” of capability within the university structure.It is driving a major three-phase program of work, the first phase of which - standing up an Azure-based enterprise data analytics platform, or EDAP - was completed last year. The focus through 2022 was on the second phase, around data governance. A third phase, planned for 2023, will see La Trobe University “turbocharge” the migration of clean, standardised datasets from across the institution into the EDAP.

Horizon Power has completed a large-scale migration of applications and workloads from its data centres to a private cloud run by Macquarie Cloud Services. The shift to private cloud was for several reasons. The WA government wants agencies and owned companies to have more of a cloud mindset. In parallel, the government has set ambitious targets to reduce whole-of-government carbon emissions, and exiting its data centre was seen as a key way for Horizon Power’s Technology team to do its part. The private cloud choice was also partially for security reasons - Horizon Power has obligations under the Security of Critical Infrastructure or SOCI Act to contend with. Horizon Power is now set up to achieve some future-facing and data-driven ambitions, leveraging other cloud-based services.

In this week’s episode of the iTnews Podcast, Police bank chief executive office Greg McKenna talks about the banks ongoing whole-of-bank transformation which has been on the path of renewal as customers increasingly seek digital channels.

Head of Information Security and IT, Elliot Colquhoun. Airwallex is an Australian finance unicorn ($1bn+ valuation), and Colquhoun runs its IT and information security operations. The company has spent the past two years overhauling its application landscape and upgrading computers - a 50/50 Windows/Mac end-user environment. One of the reasons to do this, however, is that Colquhoun believes the state of internal systems is a signal to developers and builders about the quality that should be built into customer-facing products. The idea is to set a high internal bar, which then gets reflected in the products. IT and infosec also makes itself available to product teams to provide input and guidance.

Executive Director of Information Systems & Technology, Hamish Cameron was a guest of the podcast back in mid-2021 when he outlined his ambitions for a mobile workforce transformation program, equipping 6000 sworn and non-sworn staff with a smartphone. Almost two years on, they are now in live pilot, and the podcast discusses device choice, applications developed and loaded, and UX efforts being run in parallel. Outside of the transformation, we also discuss IS&T’s efforts to transform its own operations so as to move from a service provider to a trusted advisor and influencer on technology matters to the broader SAPOL. This reflects the broader role that technology is playing in policing, and IS&T’s desire to have a front row seat strategically.

In this weeks episode we’re joined by Alex.Bank chief executive Simon Beitz. As Australia’s newest bank we’ll discuss future plans and how the bank ensures its technology foundations are capable of scale and instilling the right processes while keeping the customer at the forefront of its mission. We’ll also talk about the early days of sleeping on shed floors as team mapped out its digital banking journey.

Our guest this week is John Cox, the CTO of Coles Group. There’s a lot of interesting things happening at Coles, including an in-progress shift to an events-based architecture. This has wide-ranging use cases, from in-store replenishment and reducing out-of-stocks on ecommerce orders, to anticipating customer service and listing next-best actions for team members. We also discuss the Group’s IT strategy, and why adoption of cloud services is not a specific strategic pillar.

What does it take to set up the IT infrastructure at a zoo from scratch? It’s not something many IT managers will do, but Alonzo got the chance to, and shares a very different kind of startup story. This talks to the evolution from a one-person IT shop to the gradual build-up of resources and systems, and particularly how the zoo leant on technology partners to create innovative systems, from point-of-sale, to telecommunications, to accepting a wide variety of electronic payments. A specific case study in the episode also speaks to the zoo’s data analytics and BI environment, which is based on Azure and Power BI.

We begin this episode with a special message from editor-in-chief Ry Crozier. We look forward to bringing you new episodes in 2023!