In this episode of Executive with a Cause, host Tammy Ven Dange chats with Brett Wilson, CIO of Red Cross Australia.
Few charities have a Chief Information Officer (CIO). In fact, many don’t even have an IT department. So how does the CIO of one of the largest national charities in Australia manage IT risks while dealing with skill shortages and increasing business needs? You won’t want to miss this episode as Tammy and Brett discuss these challenges and more.
Few charities have a Chief Information Officer (CIO). In fact, many don’t even have an IT department. So how does the CIO of one of the largest national charities in Australia manage IT risks while dealing with skill shortages and increasing business needs? You won’t want to miss this episode as Tammy and Brett discuss these challenges and more.
As a large organisation with over 2,000 staff and 25,000 volunteers, Brett describes managing their broad needs and the importance of ensuring the corporate side of an organisation is engaging with operational staff and volunteers. For the Red Cross, this includes volunteering within their Red Cross shops to ensure staff understand the broader business and enable them to achieve their goals.
Brett has many great suggestions for doing more with less. From leveraging partners for NFP tech pricing to increasing work location flexibility and basing some teams overseas, Red Cross is maximising its budget.
Furthermore, Brett explains implementing ‘bots’ to automate manual tasks such as transferring information across legacy systems and how this has allowed them to be more responsive to disaster appeals.
Finally, we go ‘big picture’ and discuss aligning short-term improvements with overall organisational strategy and focusing on ‘value-add’ activities when resources are limited.
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IT in Plain English
In this week’s episode, Tammy answers the question, ‘what is the metaverse?’
Although commonly bounced around lately, there isn’t one clear definition or understanding of its benefits. However, the metaverse can be described as a new virtual reality enabled through emerging technologies such as blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The real question though is, “should you even care as a NFP executive?”
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Topics from this episode:
- 0.00 | Introduction
- 01.02 | The two parts of Red Cross Australia
- 02.20 | Entering the NFP sector
- 03.35 | Chief Information Officer role
- 06.52 | Strategy for NFPs
- 09.44 | Transitioning from the private sector
- 12.20 | Addressing Shadow IT
- 14.45 | Managing data in a large organisation
- 16.50 | Improving business engagement
- 20.55 | Utilising partner skillsets
- 27.32 | Cybersecurity
- 30.22 | Moving to the cloud
- 34.00 | Foundational transformation
- 37.55 | Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
- 43.15 | Investing in IT
- 45.10 | Closing advice
- 49.16 | IT in Plain English
Quotes from Brett Wilson in this episode:
“Red Cross in Australia is broken up into two specific areas. One being Lifeblood, which is obviously where they have a series of donation platforms and areas and provide blood to Australia. And the other is the humanitarian side. So I work on the humanitarian side, where we provide relief for emergencies, disasters, and community support. And so our core mission is around how do we provide an increase in impact for humanitarian effort?”
“About ten years ago, we moved away from that sort of federated, decentralised model to the centralised model. And the key reason for that was to try and leverage off the economies of scale and not have to have a team in every location to run technology.”
“Overall, my role is looking forward. How do we look? How do we spend time out in the organisation? So I spent probably 60 to 70 per cent of my time out in the organisation actually understanding where the business challenges are, trying to understand and influence parts of the organisation to make sure that we are putting in the right technology to help them address and achieve their business goals as well. I have an amazing team underneath me that run the technology pieces; security, planning and architecture, and sort of digital as well. So they run the technical pieces. And for me, it’s about understanding how do we move forward. And how do we leverage off technology to create more impact from a humanitarian perspective, but also working with our partners as well? And in making sure that we end up with a technology stack that enables the organisation to achieve its goals.”
“It’s not about chasing the latest shiny thing. It’s about making sure that you can add the most amount of value for the funding and the resources that you have.”
“How do you leverage partners as much as possible? A lot of the large tech companies have NFP pricing, as well as additional support; it’s really important you leverage off those. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re a small Not for Profit or a large one; we all still get the same set of pricing and everything else. So it’s really important to tap into those. But they will also provide additional support and potentially some resourcing to help you use their tools better to achieve the goals of the organisation.”
“I think it goes back to that governance piece, making sure that there are the guardrails, and everyone knows what those guardrails are. They’re in place to make sure that they don’t do something that will end up either as a data breach or something else like that.”
“It’s kind of like a bay of disconnected islands of data. And we have little bridges between some of them and we have nothing between some of them and then they sit out there.”
“It’s a hard one because you need to go back to that governance piece around what’s that central source of truth? Where is that specific master data sitting that might feed into another platform or system? The challenge is when you come up with two sources of truth, which one is the source of truth?.”
“It goes back to using the resources they have more efficiently and maybe breaking the mould a little bit here. Because I don’t think there’s a lot of NFPs that are actually offshoring. And so, for me, it was how do we use those resources more effectively? And there is a cost factor in it as well. So I can get three resources potentially. Whereas if I had outsourced it in Australia, I would have probably got an outcome, but it would have cost me three times as much.”
“We’ve just been to the board recently and put a proposal forward to look at simplifying the organisation. So as I mentioned, we have 200-odd applications. They’re all running between-point solutions for integration. So every time we do an upgrade to one system, we then need to go and check all these other systems as well. So for us, it was how do we take a step back? And if we were to almost reimagine what the future would look like for Red Cross from a technology stack perspective, what could it look like?”
“We’ve been dabbling around using RPA. So Robotic Process Automation. Since last year, we’ve now got five bots running. And so what it means for us is we can almost automate what a human person does. A really good example is our cash grant system. We had one person sitting there, and all they were doing was moving information between two legacy systems because we couldn’t connect them. We’re now using RPA on that, and I think the saving was around eight FTE, just to do the grants applications.”
“What it also means is we can speed it up because bots run 24 hours a day. Whereas people can only run realistically eight hours a day.”
“I think if you look at the way that the organisations are changing. Now every organisation runs on technology; you can’t do something without touching technology. If you don’t have the right team involved to run the technology on a day-to-day basis, and they’re not trained appropriately, you will end up spending more time because you’ve got something that’s not fit for purpose.”
“If you don’t start investing in technology and the security as well, you will end up spending more time manual processing. If you’ve got a team that is actually trained up, they will come with more ideas and more thoughts around how do we refine a process or how do we do things better. If they’re not appropriately trained, they will still think of some great things, but you could probably achieve so much more with people with the right skills who are looking forward as well.”
“Probably the key thing would be to go out and work in the business for a little while. For us, we’ve got Red Cross shops, we’ve got volunteering opportunities. So my plan is to still get the team to go out and spend some time. It’s not just sitting in your office or sitting at home; make sure you engage with other parts of the organisation because they’re your best advocates. You’re really enabling them to be successful in achieving their goals. So make sure you go out and spend some time and build up those relationships with areas outside of your specific area that you normally wouldn’t.”
Links & Resources
- Connect with Brett on Linkedin
- Visit the Australian Red Cross website
- Learn more about Shadow IT from Tammy’s IT in Plain English segment
Credits
Thanks to our Producer, Nick Whatman, and the entire team at Lonsdale St. Studio. Thanks also to our Digital Content Creator, Laura Kleinrahm.
Tammy Ven Dange is a former charity CEO, Not for Profit Board Member and IT Executive. Today she helps NFPs with strategic IT and data decisions with her business, Roundbox Consulting.