With a career spanning both public and private sectors, as well as executive and consulting roles, Conrad Mackenzie’s role as Chief Digital Officer at Business Australia leverages all the skills and experience he has accumulated so far.
Conrad Mackenzie has two ways of looking back over his career to date. An alumnus of Sydney University, where he gained his PhD in computer science, Mackenzie is now the Chief Digital Officer at Business Australia (a new membership brand of the New South Wales Business Chamber). If you slice his career one way, he says, he’s spent half of it in the private sector and half in government. Slice it another way and it’s been split fairly evenly between consulting roles and executive positions.
Mackenzie came to Business Australia after a brief stint in academia, as the Chief Digital Officer at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). There he faced the challenging task of delivering the institution’s ‘2025 Strategy’, which required transformational change in its core areas of teaching and learning, research and operations, with the notion of disruption as a key driving force.
This was preceded by extended roles at a range of blue chip companies, including PwC, NAB, ANZ and Deloitte, deepening his vast experience in strategy development and delivery.
Mackenzie has been in his current position for three years and is involved in assisting Business Australia’s transformation from a 195-year-old state-based organisation to a new national brand that “knows no borders”.
“We really wanted to go hard on digital services,” he says, “so we have members joining from right around the country. We have about 50 offices around Australia that are operational sites from where we deliver our services.”
His role changes according to demand, he says. “For the last three years, I have been working on both the transformation design and the implementation of the design, while relying on a team of people to deliver technical services.
“Now that we have the core foundational projects mostly complete, I can spend more time focusing on the creation of new service products to members and customers.”
Business Australia’s remit is to help businesses by providing business and advocacy services on behalf of its members, in such areas as legal, HR and workplace, marketing and promotion, cash flow, grants and funding, mentoring, apprenticeships and traineeships, exports and other business advice.
Taking its own advice
Despite its status as a go-to organisation for businesses looking to improve their operations, Mackenzie says that previously Business Australia’s approach to technology wasn’t as strong as it could have been. “It had a do-it-yourself mentality that was cheap and cheerful and didn’t always work,” he says. This needed to change, for security reasons first and foremost. “It wasn’t necessarily cyber safe, so one of the things I’ve worked very hard on is elevating the challenges around technology, to educate the enterprise from the Board down that technology is difficult to do well. It’s brittle when it’s put in place and you need to leverage it to the maximum to get a return on your investment.”
One of the main IT challenges Business Australia faced was the simple act of getting its members to renew. “For a member organisation, we are at risk of members receiving the ‘please renew now’ email and hitting the delete button. Member organisations around the world are all facing the same challenge,” he says. “So we needed to reinvent the model, remove the commercial impediment to signing up, reinforce the existing membership offerings we had and make it compellingly attractive to stick around.”
This is where AC3 came into the mix
Mackenzie indicates his top three criteria for choosing a technology partner. It needed to be a local, Australian-owned business, have all the right skills and focus on the infrastructure challenges Business Australia was facing, and it also needed to have the right cultural fit. AC3 ticked all these boxes and more.
Mackenzie says he was also looking for a tech partner that would take the reins completely. “For a business our size of about 700 people, we wanted to take advantage of the trends in the infrastructure industry, but not own anything ourselves, not design it, not manage it,” he explains.
“We wanted someone else to take all of that work from us so that we could concentrate on the more difficult challenges associated with the applications and bringing new services to market.”
AC3 obliged, covering all of the technology components, beginning with the backend and incorporating the servers, storage, networks, end user computing and service desk. Business Australia also relied on AC3 for management of its database services.
The transformation was executed via a number of steps. “We implemented a ‘lift and shift’ and then optimise strategy,” explains Mackenzie. So we did that by, first, putting in place governance. This sounds dry, but it is essential and difficult to get right. And I then hired an outstanding project manager to work on our behalf with a small team.”
The Results
The partnership with AC3 has been seamless and particularly impressive given the unexpected curveball thrown at everyone during 2020, says Mackenzie. The project was completed in nine months.
“The standout result for me is being able to very quickly set up working from home for all our staff,” he says. “The pandemic caught us towards the tail end of the project and, within a very short period of time, we were able to set up working arrangements that really did satisfy people. They could take everything out of the office and work very productively from home. In fact, people think they’ve never been so productive!”
COVID aside, however, Mackenzie and Business Australia are equally satisfied with components of the partnership that would always be important – the reduction of P1 (Priority 1, which is a complete business down situation, where the client is unable to operate) and P2 (Priority 2, which sees a major part of the client’s ability to operate being affected, causing major problems, but not a total shutdown) incidents. “This continues on a downward trend,” says Mackenzie.
“The third most important thing for me is that I now have an evergreen technical environment, where AC3 manages all of the components to a contemporary level.
“And I do not need to worry about refreshing it,” he says.
Takeaway learnings
The transformation process has taught Mackenzie some valuable lessons, he says. “Our key reinforcement for me is that ‘lift and shift’, then optimise, is the only way to go. If you think you can optimise in advance or as you are transforming, you will never complete. The second is that you’re always going to find surprises. It’s a bit like renovating a very old house that you’ve just bought and you discover lots of surprises. So make sure you’ve got a good contingency.
As well as ‘lifting and shifting’ before optimising, Mackenzie also advises tech leaders following the Business Australia pathway to take extra time to explain the process to non-technical associates. “Invariably, you find your business colleagues won’t understand the details of the technology dilemmas that you’re facing. And so you have to work doubly hard in bringing them along on the journey.”
Ensuring your company has designed a reporting framework and a pragmatic cost out is also vital he says, adding that the latter should be balanced with value. “You really need to track the benefits at a detailed level as you’re developing the project, because you will forget about them when you’re held to account on project closure,” he warns.
When it comes to general advice for tech leaders, Mackenzie believes in looking for the talent. “It’s all about skills,” he says. “Surround yourself with the best possible skills... And also make sure you’ve got the basics in place and they are tight before you start to play with some of the new and exciting things that exist in our technology world.”
And of course he also recommends getting the right partners on board. The working relationship with AC3 is a powerful one, he says, with the tech company looking after Business Australia’s entire IT estate and tech supply chain, leaving it to focus on its members and customers.
“My experience with AC3 has been characterised by two things very important to me. The first would be
availability. Whether the person’s on the service desk or whether it’s the CEO, I feel they are available as the need arises. And the second is about care. I feel that when I’m working with the team from AC3, it’s a bit more than a transactional relationship. It’s actually a partnership.”
Future plans
With the first phase of the transformation addressed and the partnership with AC3 taking care of Business Australia’s original technology issues, Mackenzie says he’s now able to concentrate on two major areas of focus. To begin with, this means optimising the infrastructure, and in doing so, consolidating, rationalising, looking at reserved instances and ensuring the business understands exactly what technology they are consuming.
“This allows me to commence a conversation about cross-charging,” he explains. “So the business begins to properly factor in the real cost of the underlying technology.”
Added to this is his desire to leverage what has been achieved as new service products are developed for delivery to members.
After three years in his role, Mackenzie says his satisfaction stems from it being a wonderful opportunity to bring together and leverage all the skills and learnings he’s accrued throughout his career to date. “I’ve developed the strategic plan, I was able to develop the technology architecture and participate in the transformational design for the business and the development of new service products. I was able to go through the procurements for all the large projects from third party vendors and I ran all the projects, or with a team of people, and delivered them. Plus I’ve set up a very tight IT operational function,” he says. “And I’ve done that pretty well with a blank sheet of paper. For someone with my career, that’s a pretty exciting prospect.”