IMC Communications recent executive lunch with guest speaker Bob Mansfield has been covered by attendee Dr. Catriona Wallace, Managing Director of Fifth Quadrant, in her blog ‘your call.’
Read the blog entry as it appeared in ‘your call’ here:
Today, lunch was hosted by IMC Communications who are an IT solutions and Knowledge Management company (product is Livepro) who play actively in the contact centre space. The guest speaker was Bob Mansfield OAM. Bob has been the CEO for McDonalds, Wormald, Optus and Fairfax and was also the Chairman of Telstra. At the lunch, under the careful facilitation of IMC’s Matty Dixon, Bob addressed an audience of predominantly CIOs. Bob’s key messages to the audience included:
1.Ideas from the dot com boom are only now being realised
2.The NBN will be regarded as ‘game changing’ as the coming of electricity or the motor vehicle
3.Cloud computing will be important, however Boards currently don’t understand it
4.Change is coming faster and more impactful than ever before
5.The economy won’t return to how it has been in the last 10 years
6.To thrive organisations must be agile, restless, change, focus on their management systems
7.The CIO role will become more critical to business success and in future we will see CIOs becoming CEOs
8.Only 10% of the Fortune 500 CIOs are women….. however…. 5 of the top 10 most highly paid CIOs are women. Brilliant.
9.Australia although in better shape than other economies has the challenge of a low level of investment in new ideas. This is in contrast with the US and its continuing funding of Silicon Valley ideas.
10.Australia needs better corporate and political leadership
11.Technology will be key in remaining competitive
12.Speed is critical
The CBA’s CIO, Michael Harte, spoke about the CBA’s aggressive and innovative forays into technology.
I spoke briefly about investment going into CRM, WFO (WFM and Quality) and Knowledge Management applications over the next 12 months and also noted that Boards and C level executives do not understand service strategy and service technology. I quoted a Board that I have been working with recently where I had to explain how web chat worked. Funny. Not Funny.