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Keynote
Performance and creative thinking under pressure
Dr Craig Challen, Star of Courage (SC) Order of Australia Medal (OAM)
In this session, Dr Craig Challen SC OAM, the 2019 West Australian of the Year and cave diving explorer shared his insights on winning mindsets that can drive us forward, compelling us to explore and adventure into the unknown. Plus, what it takes to ensure focus that enables performance under pressure when it matters most. Like in 2018 when Dr Craig Challen rescued 12 young soccer players and their coach from a flooded Thai cave in Chiang Rai, Thailand.
Performance and creative thinking under pressure
[Title: Dr Craig Challen]
Well, thanks very much, Aaron.
I am going to tell you today about this extraordinary series of events that I found myself at the centre of in 2008.
And it all started innocently enough in northern Thailand, a junior soccer team were at training on Saturday morning, and it was one of the boys' birthdays.
And they decided in celebration of that they were going to go off that afternoon and have a bit of an adventure.
After training, they hopped on their bikes and rode down to the local national park where there was a fairly well-known cave, Tham Luang cave.
Their plan was to go caving in this cave, see what was in there, and just generally hang out together and have a good time.
This is not a difficult cave at all. Some of the boys had been there before. It's certainly not a technical caving trip. Most of it's just easy walking passage. There's a few crawl ways and places where you have to climb over some rocks or over a bit of a mud pile. But really any moderately fit and healthy person can go in there and have a pretty good time.
And that's what these boys did. They headed in; we think they went in about a kilometer and a half or so and were on their way back out again when the plan went awry.
And they came up against one of the idiosyncrasies of this cave.
[Image: Danger sign in front of cave.]
This sign that you see on this slide here is displayed at the front of the cave. Hopefully, you can read the yellow writing down the bottom. It says, in somewhat loosely translated English, from July to November, the cave is flooding season.
What that means is that this cave, it's dry for most of the year during the monsoon season, which generally starts around the middle of July in northern Thailand; it starts raining, and when it rains there, it really buckets down. The annual rainfall in this area is about two meters per year. Just about all of it arrives in these few months between the middle of July and through till about October or so.
And what happens? The cave is sitting at the base of this little range of hills, limestone hills, which are full of holes and tunnels and caves, and these will start filling up until they're essentially waterlogged. They start to overflow. Tham Luang cave is a major conduit for drainage of these whole range of hills, and a wave of water flows suddenly down through the cave, and it starts to flood.
These boys had been the victims of a pretty unfortunate coincidence that they happened to be in there some weeks earlier. This was all happening on the 22nd of June. So weeks earlier than the cave would normally be expected to flood.
It all happened while they were in at the furthest point of their expedition. So if they had gone in an hour earlier, then they would have been back out again by the time that this event happened. If they'd gone in an hour later, they never would have got into the cave in the first place. So I really, I don't think they had done anything wrong. It was just bad luck that they ended up in this predicament, but a predicament they were indeed in.
They came around the corner on their way out and were confronted with what we call a sump in caving, which is a low part of the cave that's filled up to the ceiling with water.
They knew they hadn't gone the wrong way because there's only one way into the cave and one way back out again.
Coach Ekk, who was an assistant coach that was with them. There were 12 boys altogether aged between 11 and 16 years old and a 25-year-old coach, and the coach had made a bit of a heroic effort to get out. He had a length of rope with them. He tied one end around his waist and gave the other into a couple of the bigger boys and tried to duck dive out through the sump. But he wasn't to know that this sump was probably already at this early stage about a 100 meters long or so. So there's no way he was going to breath-hold dive his way through that. Very quickly, he came to that realization and gave a couple of tugs on the end of the rope, and the boys pulled him back out, and they noticed at that stage that the waters were still rising.
So they had to go further into the cave to get away from the water. They ended up at a place that's 2.2 kilometers inside the cave through a largely flooded passage. At that point, they found a spot where they were safe from the water, at the top of this muddy embankment, about five or six meters out of the water in an area that it's, I guess, about two-thirds the size of the stage that I'm standing on.
And there was nothing else they could do but sit and wait. Now, I did say earlier that I didn't think these boys had done anything wrong going into this cave. But one thing they had arguably done wrong was not tell their mums where they were going. And so while all this is happening, nobody in the outside world knows what's going on.
The first thing anybody knew that things had gone wrong was when they didn't turn up for dinner that night; the parents started a bit of a ring around. I found out from one of the teammates that hadn't gone into the cave what was going on, and they rang the Rangers down at the National Park. Rangers went to the cave to have a look, and they found all the boys' bikes lined up on this railing outside. So clearly the boys were still in there.
[Image: photo of boys’ bikes lined up on railing outside.]
These rangers went into the cave as far as they could to have a look and see what was happening. But of course, they came to the outside of the floodwaters that were trapping these boys, and there was nothing more they could do, not having any cave diving capability. So they came out and raised the alarm, and thus began this massive effort that ultimately involved thousands of people from at least 30 different countries around the world and took the next 17 days before these boys were liberated, ultimately from the cave.
[Diagram of cave layout, from right to left diagram indicates location of entrance, rescue base, Monk's Junction and where the group was found, 2.2km within cave]
Just to try and frame your picture of this cave, there at the entrance is a big hole at the base of the hills. And that leads into a large entrance chamber, which is, I'd say, larger than this room that we're in at the moment. It's really quite spectacular. From there, there's about five or 600 meters of passage where it's mostly dry with a river running down the middle of it, a couple of places where you'd have to just duck under the water briefly for about ten meters or so. And then you come to the chamber three, our rescue base, where all the diving operations were conducted from.
But from there through to Chamber nine, where the boys were found with 600 meters of almost all flooded passage, just with one dry chamber and a couple of lake chambers where you could, on your way through, stick your head out of the water and have a bit of a chat, but you couldn't actually physically get out of the water. So, of course, no way to get through to these boys other than using cave diving techniques.
After the alarm is raised, the search for these boys begins and it was initially conducted by Thai military and police divers and some diving instructors, mostly expats that were living and working in Thailand, that gathered around and tried to find their way into the boys.
But they were facing very difficult conditions. Firstly because you couldn't see anything at all. This water that's flowing out of the cave is filled with silt and mud, and the visibility in the water is about ten centimeters or so. So you can see your hand in front of your face, but nothing beyond that. And for most of the time that diving operations were occurring, you really might as well have had your eyes closed and doing everything by feel.
The other problem was that there's this torrent of water flowing out of the cave. You could only just, when the flow was high, drag yourself in against the current and that fluctuated. There was about a 12-hour reaction time between when there was rain on the surface and when the water level started to rise. But even when they dropped it, it was still a substantial current. So the diving was not at all easy.
[Image of Rick Stanton and John Volanthen]
The first recognized cave divers that arrived on site were these two gentlemen, Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, and they flew out from the UK to help with the search and they arrived on the Wednesday following when the boys had gone missing. So this is already day five, um, that the boys have been in there and they start diving in these difficult conditions on the first dive they get in about 100 meters, a couple of hundred meters on the second dive, laying a guideline as they go, which we always do in cave diving, so that you can find your way back out again and then find your way into the same spot on the next dive, gradually working further and further into the cave until they finally broke through to chamber 9 where the boys were. And this occurred on Monday, July the 2nd.
So this is nine days after these boys have gone missing. And just take a moment to think what it's like for these kids and the coach as they're sitting in there for the nine days. They had nothing to eat, of course because they'd only expected to be in there for an hour or two, not for any substantial amount of time. T
[Image of boys in cave. Text shown: July 2nd. The boys are found]
They hadn't taken any food or supplies with them. The only thing they had to drink was this muddy water that was trapping them in the cave, which certainly didn't look very appetizing to me, but it was enough to keep them alive and keep them going. Physically, they were actually surprisingly in quite good shape when they were found. Lost a few kilos, of course, with nine days of starvation. But apart from that, you know, a couple of little coughs and skin infections and that sort of thing, but they were still pretty robust and fighting fit.
But even more than the physical conditions, imagine mentally what it was like sitting in there as the hours rolled into days and eventually stretched out to nine days. These kids are nearly adults, and they're not stupid. They are educated, and they must surely have had their moments where they thought this is how it all ends and nobody even knows where we are. They're not coming to get us, and we're going to die in here.
But all that notwithstanding, the tension was broken when Rick and John showed up, and I'm sure they were pretty pleased. I don't know what they thought when these two guys speaking this strange language and living a long, long way from the ocean in northern Thailand. I'm sure they'd never had any exposure to scuba diving equipment, let alone cave diving gear in their lives before. But that notwithstanding, they were pretty pleased to see anyone, but that pleasant surprise soon turned to disappointment when they found out that firstly, Rick and John hadn't brought any food with them because by this stage, to be honest, really everybody, and certainly those of us in the cave diving and cave rescue community, thought that this is really a search and recovery mission. Nobody held out much hope for finding them alive. Almost certainly they had perished during the initial flooding event or at some time since.
So that was a very pleasant surprise. But the other source of disappointment for them was that Rick and John hadn't brought any food in. They weren't about to just turn around and take them out again because this is no mean feat to take these kids. We were told that these kids didn't even know how to swim, and to turn them into cave divers in maybe a few hours or days, and to do this dive is a pretty demanding dive.
It would normally take many years of experience and training to get to a point where you'd be able to do this. But at this point, I'm still sitting here in Australia watching with interest, as is my dive buddy Richard Harris. I live here in Perth, and Harry lives in Adelaide. And we said, look, we're happy to come up to Thailand and lend what assistance we can. And really at that point, we thought, well, that'll be in some sort of advisory capacity. We didn't really expect to be doing the rescue ourselves, but one thing led to another, the Thai Government talked to the Australian Government, and we ended up getting a phone call from Emergency Management Australia in Canberra saying, "Get yourselves to the airport; there's a flight leaving in a couple of hours, and you are off to Thailand." And so off we went, and we arrived in northern Thailand on the evening of July 6th. So this is now day 13 after the boys have gone missing.
In the four days since they'd been found, they'd been looked after and fed and had what supplies they needed taken into them. So they were okay and safe for the moment, but certainly no closer to being extracted from the cave. And time was ticking because the monsoon season had not arrived in earnest at this stage. And when these rains came and the cave went into full flood, nobody was going in there at all. That was impossible. And we would just have to put our tools down and go home if that occurred. So we really were working against time.
When we arrived in northern Thailand, Harry looked out of the window of his plane or his window of the plane, and he could see something going on the apron, a couple of bays across from where the plane was. And he asked what was happening there.
[Image looking out of window onto the airport runway]
He was told that this was a ramp ceremony for Saman Kunan going on. Saman Kunan was the retired Thai Navy SEAL who had died in the cave earlier that day. He was the one and only casualty of this huge effort and this rescue.
[Image of ceremony for Saman Kunan]
Now, we don't know exactly what happened with Saman. There's no doubt he was a very good diver, but he was not a cave diver.
Cave diving demands a very specific set of skills different from diving in open water. And really, the lesson from this is that if you haven't got the correct training and experience to be venturing into a cave, there is a long history of people who were great divers in open water and have decided they'll just have a bit of a crack at cave diving and see how it goes, and have come unstuck. And that's probably the major source of accidents that happen in cave diving.
So on that somber note, we ventured up to the cave site that evening and sat down with the British divers to try and make a plan for extracting these boys from the cave.
[Image of cave site planning with British divers. Text shown: First Priority. Make a plan with British divers.]
At this point in time, cave diving wasn't the only game in town. People from all over the world seemed to be popping their heads up with bright ideas about how these boys might be extracted.
[Image 1: Drilling down into groundwater]
[Image 2: Draining water out of cave]
And just to give you an idea of a few of those, there were all these drilling rigs all over the place, like this one, drilling down into the groundwater. And they were pumping millions of litres of water every hour out of the ground to try and lower the water table and try and drain the cave.
There were other people up in the hills above where the boys were, and the terrain above chamber nine, where the boys were located, was about a kilometre above them.
[Images: People with picks, shovels and lengths of pipe trying to divert surface water]
These people, with just picks and shovels and lengths of pipe, were trying to divert surface water away from the cave to reduce the amount of water flowing down through the cave.
[Image of Thai police using drone to locate cave entrances]
There were other people searching for alternative entrances into the cave. So here is some Thai police using a drone to try and locate cave entrances. The trouble is that the jungle is so thick that you could really be from me to the plants away from a cave entrance. Unless you've more or less stumbled into it, you'd never know it was there.
[Image of cave divers exploring holds]
But any holes that they did find, there were cavers and climbers from all over South East Asia exploring these holes and trying to locate another way down to the boys. Exploring a cave to a depth of a kilometre, though, would normally take months, if not years. So it was highly unlikely to be achieved just in the few days that were available.
[Image of pre-combustion chamber]
There were also a few more bizarre schemes being presented, too numerous to mention here, but not the least of which was the submarine of Elon Musk. Elon turned up on site, and unfortunately, I didn't get to meet Elon. I was diving in the cave at the time that he presented himself, but he brought this submarine, which is a pretty impressive bit of kit, actually.
It's supposedly a pre-combustion chamber of one of the SpaceX rockets, and they had fabricated the nosecone for the front and a hatchway for the back. The idea was that the cave divers would swim this thing into where the boys were, take off the lid, pop one of the boys in, and screw the lid back on again and swim out with it. And that all seems pretty easy if you say it quickly.
But there were a couple of problems that we could envisage with this plan. The first one was that there didn't seem to be any life support system in the submarine, and at this stage, we had a pretty good idea of what we were facing, and it was we were anticipating about 3 hours to make our way out of the cave with the boys. Yeah, 3 hours is quite a long time to hold your breath once the oxygen inside the submarine runs out.
The other problem is that this thing's made of this high-tech alloy of lithium and aluminum, which was super light. I think that's great for going into space, but no good for diving. Those of you that are scuba divers will know that in order to make yourself heavy enough to get underwater, you normally have to attach a lead weight belt to yourself. So all of this is pointed out to the engineers from SpaceX, and they said, "Oh, no problem."
[Image: scuba cylinders strapped onto the submarine]
They went away and came back the next day and had strapped a couple of scuba cylinders to the submarine, wrapped some weight belts around it. And it did, as you can see here, actually get as far as pool testing. But there was one outstanding problem with this, and it was too big to fit through some of the restricted areas in the cave.
There were a couple of places, one in particular where we could only just squeeze through with rock on our chest and rock on our back. So the submarine itself wasn't going to be getting through. So all of these plans, one by one, fell away or were eliminated as implausible. And to our great consternation, we're really left with just cave diving as the sole way to try and extract these boys. So we refined our plan.
[Diagram showing how the divers would swim with the boys]
This is essentially the way that we were going to bring the boys out. So there'd be one diver with each of the boys. The patient would be a little self-contained unit wearing a full face mask, scuba cylinder strapped to their chest, and this harness with a handle on the back. So the diver would guide them out through the three-hour journey. Just one hand on the guideline, remembering that unlike what's shown in this diagram, that you can't see anything at all. The other hand on the boy and just start at the beginning and work it out.
But that notwithstanding, there was one problem that we kept coming back to, which was that we thought there was a pretty good chance that some of these boys were going to panic on the way out. You know, breathing scuba for the first time with your head underwater is a pretty disconcerting experience for some people. There's definitely some people that don't really take to it that well. And this was going to go on for 3 hours, during which time they wouldn't be able to see anything and they'd have to be totally trusting of the diver that was with them. And if they started panicking and thrashing around underwater, then they were certainly going to kill themselves and quite possibly take a diver out with them as well.
And so the suggestion was made that perhaps these boys could be anesthetized for the trip out. Now, I don't know if there's anybody with a medical background in the audience here, but you don't really need to be a medico to know that anesthetizing someone and then putting their head underwater for 3 hours is not something that you do. And you know, this is certainly fraught with danger for the patient.
But as we discussed it, we eventually came to the view that it possibly was the lesser of two evils and presented the greatest safety route for the boys. So we started working this up. It was all pretty complicated, but very simply, the way we were going to use a drug called ketamine as the anesthetic agent, which was ideal for quite a number of reasons for us but did have one disadvantage, and that is that it only lasts for about 45 minutes. And if you divide the three-hour transit time by 45 minutes, you can see that we could expect these boys to wake up multiple times during the dive and have to be given another dose to put them back to sleep.
Now, that wasn't too much problem for Harry and I, the two Australians. I'm Harry, is an anesthetist by profession, and so this is just like a normal day at the office for him. Really. I am a veterinarian, and so I've used a lot of ketamine in my career. Um, I can now report, with the benefit of hindsight, that anesthetizing dogs and starving children, it's all pretty much the same. And they all seem to go okay.
But there were four other British divers in the rescue team and they had jobs where one was a retired fireman. There was a rope access worker and a couple of I.T. dudes. And so not really a whole lot of medical expertise between them when it was mentioned to them that they would be giving these doses of anesthetic, there were some concerned faces around the room.
[Image: Meeting with British divers]
But look, these are the best cave divers in the world; they're 'can do' sort of people, and so in the absence of really any alternatives, they decided that they'd give it a go.
So we started bringing them up to speed, first of all, with a lecture compressing about six years of training into 20 minutes or so. And following that day, there was a practical session because some of them had never even given an injection before. So they all had a bit of practice giving water injections into a plastic coke bottle. Following that exhaustive process, they signed off with the certificates of competency in underwater anesthesia, and we were good to go.
And we eventually received approval from the Thai government about 9:00 in the morning on July 8th. So that is day 15 after the boys had gone missing, that we could start this mission. By an hour or so after that, we were on our way into the cave.
[Image of rescue in process]
And this is one of the rare photos of the rescue actually in process. So on the right there, you see one of the boys. He's been anesthetized at this stage. He's been dressed up in the scuba gear that he's going to be wearing: the mask, cylinder of 80% oxygen strapped to his chest. And at this point, he'll now have a couple of tests dunking underwater just to make sure that he's breathing OK, all the gear is working fine. And from that point, he'll be passed off to one of the divers and begin this trip out.
And the rescue was conducted over three days. So we brought four boys out on the first day, four on the second day, and then the last four plus coach Ekk on the final day. I do want to be perfectly frank with you that, really, we had no expectation at all that we were going to get these boys out. We fully expected there to be casualties. It's a pretty confronting thing to go in there, particularly on the first day, really having no confidence in this plan. And you look at these kids who are, you know, basically happy, healthy kids. And despite the ordeal that they've been through, they’re still jumping around and acting like idiots, like teenage boys are supposed to be doing.
And you think to yourself, by the end of today, we might have turned some of these boys into corpses and be dragging them out of the cave in body bags. And really, the only thing that motivated us to continue was the lack of alternatives. We were perfectly satisfied by this stage that we had the only way of getting these boys out, and if they remained in the cave, then they were definitely doomed. It was going to be at least four or five months before the cave dried out, and they'd be able to walk back out again. And if they stayed in there, not only were they certain to die, but it was going to be a pretty horrible death of starvation or exposure or infection, whatever it was that got them in the end, which would probably happen over a period of some weeks. But I still feel where you're scratching around for excuses to undertake this task by saying that. But obviously our risk assessment was pretty poor because as history shows, we did get all of them out alive over that three days.
I can assure you that as I stand here today, nobody is more surprised than me. It still seems absolutely fantastic. And if we were presented with the same situation today, I would still be just as apprehensive about trying to get these boys out. But it all went okay. They all survived the dive.
[Image of equipment]
At the end of the dive, there's still the 500 metres or so of dry cave to get them out, and that would normally be no mean rescue on its own. But happily, there were hundreds of people in that section of the cave that could help. So they put in a stretcher. They go out through a high line. The last little bit just passed from hand to hand along the way, along the pathway.
[Image of diving equipment]
And at the end of the three days, of course, there's this much rejoicing. We were all pretty happy with ourselves at this unexpected good fortune that we had and that the boys had. And the following day after the rescue, we asked if we could go down to the hospital where the boys were being kept in for a few days and, uh, and just visit them and see how they were going. And we were given permission to do that. So we went down to Chiang Rai District Hospital. They had a ward devoted to them and spent about an hour and a half or so hanging out there, having a bit of a chat, which was all done through an interpreter. There was only one of the boys that really spoke any English, but that's always a bit difficult dealing through interpreters. But we did manage to get the message that they seemed to be fairly pleased with us.
[Image with Harry]
And this is a photo of Harry with one of the smallest boys, one of the 11 year olds. This kid was a tiny little kid. He only stood about this high, weighed 29 kilos, and that was before he went into the cave. So a couple of kilos lighter. Undoubtedly, by the time he came out and this little kid, for some reason that’s obscure to me, goes by the nickname of Titan. The thing I remember most about Titan is whenever I saw him during this whole process, he always had this big cheesy grin on his face, and he and all of these kids really, you know, they were totally up for this adventure and the situation that they found themselves in.
And I do often reflect that if I found myself in a situation like they were in and I could meet it with all the optimism and good humor and courage that they did, then I would be pretty pleased with myself. So they get ten out of ten from me. They are great kids and they are the real heroes of this story.
[Video with no sound, Text shown: Saturday June 23rd 2018. The boys are found]
Just in closing, I want to point out to you, lest there be any doubt that we are not professional rescuers at all. We're just some dudes with this unusual hobby of cave diving that probably most people have never heard of. So this is what we normally do, and this is cave exploration in a cave in New Zealand called the Pearse Resurgence. Um, this dive went to a depth of 245 meters and took about 17 hours in six-degree water, which I will admit that when you put it like that, cave diving possibly doesn't sound that attractive. But nevertheless, it's been a great experience over more than 25 years for me.
And that does point to, I think, one of the lessons that we can learn from this whole story. Um, you know, we're talking about optimism, optimization today, and I guess we're also talking about optimism, but particularly about optimization and, you know, we were optimizing this for this rescue in the sense that we're doing the same thing over and over again and just fine-tuning and making it better every time because this was a one-off. I don't expect to ever undertake another rescue like this in my lifetime, although if one does pop its head up, I do have some confidence that I and my colleagues will be on the call list.
But the real story for us is, you know, a history of, in my case, over 25 years of cave exploration. Some of my colleagues have been doing it for longer than that. And it's all those experiences, there are other experiences in life of adventures that we've had. And I've had a business and professional career, all of these things build you to be the person that you are. And I often think that, you know, in our own small way, all of us are going to face a great challenge or task at some stage during our lives. You know, for most of us, it’s not going to be rescuing some kids from a muddy hole in Thailand. But, you know, whatever it might be, challenges in our business or professional career, illness in something in ourselves or someone close to us, getting caught in a natural disaster or war zone, all of these things can just appear as you come around the next corner, and you haven't got the chance to prepare for them once they present themselves.
But what you can do and it's behooved and upon all of us, I think, to, to optimize ourselves and to use all of your experiences, whether they be work or in your personal life or your adventures or your hobbies, all of those things stack up and enable you to optimize yourself and present yourself in the best light for this challenge when it does occur.
So I've gone on slightly longer than I expected, but we've still got a few minutes left to sneak in some questions. So if anybody would like to ask questions about the rescue or cave diving or really anything else at all, then we've got a couple of microphones roving around somewhere.
Put up your hand, and we'll see what we can do with them.
Oh, come on. Yes.
At the back there.
Um, how did you choose the boys' order for the three days, and was it by their weight or who put up their hand first when you excavate out of the cave?
Yeah.
So the order the boys came out and was that was the source of some argument and conjecture, and really nobody wanted to take responsibility for this, bearing in mind that, you know, we thought this was quite possibly a death sentence.
It did initially fall to Harry as the attending physician to make this decision. And he wanted nothing to do with that. So he handballed the question to Coach Ekk, and Coach Ekk also didn't want the responsibility. And so he passed the question on to the boys themselves.
And he said to them, look, I, you guys, four of you are going out tomorrow. Best men step forward. And the boys all went into a little bit of a huddle and had a meeting amongst themselves. And they eventually chose the four boys that lived furthest away from the cave. And the reason for that is because they thought when they got out that they would have to hop on their bikes and ride home. And so they just wanted to give those particular boys a bit of a head start.
Now, that story does sound a little bit too cute to be true, but when we went back to visit the following year and catch up with the boys, that was one of the questions that I had to ask them was, is this really true? And they swear that that is a true story. So I think that says something about kids being pretty down to earth.
Got one up the back there.
Just watching that video, I couldn't think of anything worse than being underwater in the dark. Lost.
Um, why cave diving? What do you get out of it? What's your interest? What does it solve in your life? Why cave diving?
Well, usually my short answer to that question is if you need to ask the question, then you wouldn't understand the answer.
Um, you know, I got into it just by good luck or bad luck, you might think.
Yeah, I had always been interested in adventure sports and I had done a few things, but I'd done scuba diving, and I just ran into someone that was a cave diving instructor and introduced me to the idea of it.
And I can remember from the moment that I heard about it, I thought, that is way cool. That that is the thing for me. That was in the mid to late nineties, and I've been going around the world and doing it ever since, and it's been fantastic.
A lot of it's, you know, the technical challenge, and you do get to have some really cool toys. My timing was really lucky that sort of rode this wave of what's called the technical diving revolution where technology was advancing, techniques were advancing, and it was all happening sort of for ten years or so. It seemed like every week there was some new breakthrough, and it was a very exciting time to be caught up in.
But probably even more than that is that this is really exploration, and with caving, it's the only opportunity that I can think of that we've got these days to go somewhere that nobody has ever been before and see something that has never been seen before by human eyes. And that's a great privilege. And I feel like I've been so lucky to have been a part of it.
We've got time for one more question, and this gentleman in the middle here has been eagerly holding his hand up. Um. Oh, sorry. We can't all be winners.
Um, those boys now must be young adults. And I'm wondering if you've kept track of them and how they're doing and whether that remarkable experience has changed their lives.
Look, I'm sure it has changed their lives, but these just seem like normal kids to me. I've been back a couple of times to meet with them. It's just about time to go back again. And they're all just living their lives, as you say. The oldest of them is 21 now. And so they're growing up and getting on with it. We had the very sad news a couple of months ago that one of them had died. He was the captain of the team and the one that really showed some athletic promise. And he was in the UK pursuing his dream of being a professional athlete, and the story's a bit, um, a bit loose.
But it seems that he got hit on the head while he was at training, and nobody really thought too much of it. You know, we all got hit on the head plenty of times when we were young people, and he must have had some sort of, um, cerebrovascular accident or something. He went home and died in his sleep that night. But the rest of them and he himself, up until that time, I'm assured, are doing really well. They don't seem any worse for wear. And you know, I think kids are pretty tough, really. And until us as adults, we come along and try and enfeeble them and put our adult patheticness on them, there was, I mean, this is a pretty resilient mob of kids, I guess, and they were a group that were prepared to go off caving by themselves, but nevertheless, they were just sort of normal people that at the end of the day wanted to survive. They were prepared to do whatever it took. And I'm sure and I certainly hope that they've taken some lessons from that, if nothing else.
They'll have some pretty good stories to tell their grandkids.
So we're well out of time now, but thank you for your attention.
[Your Business Optimised. Telstra and Telstra Purple logo]
Automation & ESG
Automation and responsible operations
David Burns, Group Executive, Telstra Enterprise
Deloitte’s Enabling Positive Climate Action Report stated that over the next 10 years, the total cumulative avoided emissions that could be enabled by Telstra's services and products are estimated at 41 MtCO2e. This could be even larger through greater use of Telstra's existing technologies or implementation of new technologies. In this session, David Burns discussed the value Telstra tech can deliver towards helping businesses achieve more responsible operations and hit your ESG targets this year.
Automation and responsible operations
[Title: Welcome back, Telstra Your Business Optimised. Telstra and Telstra Purple logo. Welcome to the stage, David Burns, Group Executive, Telstra Enterprise]
I'm David Burns.
I'm the Group Executive of Telstra Enterprise. And let me give you my thanks for being here today and joining us.
At the end of the day, I know you have a choice of what to do with your time, and the fact that you wish to spend your time with us at Telstra is our privilege and our honor. So thank you very much.
We're also merging the two parallel streams that we've had today. We've had a channel partner stream, which is an incredibly important part of our ecosystem, and a customer stream. We've brought those two together, and I'd like to think it's because they've come to hear me speak. But that's absolutely and utterly not correct; it will be perhaps who I might talk to at the end of this brief session.
We've been around the country. This is stop number four. We've been in Brisbane, we've been in Perth, we've been in Adelaide, and here we are in the fabulous city of Melbourne, my former home. I've married a Sydney girl, said, "Well, I love it, but don't hold that against me." I now live in Sydney, and it's great to be back in this city and in this state where so much innovation and development occur. So thank you.
At Enterprise, Telstra, Enterprise, and Telstra Purple, we would like to think of ourselves as being able to be your strategic technology partner and drive some of those really important innovation and technology decisions that you have moving forward.
We've taken the strategy of what we're doing as enterprise to be much, much, much more than a connectivity company and how we move up that stack to help you in your efficiency of your organization, how we help you in your I.T. and O.T. systems across the board. And that's part of our objective: how do we add more and more value to you as an organization? And we do that through ourselves and our important partnerships with technology partners and channel partners, and I'll speak a little bit more about that later, but a lot of what we do sits on top of this great network that we have.
And so I just wanted to take a moment to give you an example of how we use our technology, how we enable companies to lead their innovation. And also, I mean, as you hear them talk about a little bit of their own version of ESG in how they like to make films. And we're going to look at a filmmaking group making an Australian feature film called Blue Back. It's not yet out in the marketplace. But not only did we help them keep connected in one of what would have to be one of the most beautifully remote parts of this country, but help them keep that creative and innovation process developing.
Let's have a look at that video.
[Video starts]
[Video title] Supporting remote film production. Telstra’s mobile broadband solution.
[Video header] On location Bremer Bay WA. Blueback feature film.
Tara Bilston, Associate Producer
There's no way that we would be able to film out here in Bremer without the connectivity that we have, because it just would be so slow. Communication would be too slow. The film just wouldn't work.
James Grandison, Producer
The remote technology system that's been put in place by Telstra has been a huge help to this production because we’ve got some unique challenges around the location we're in being quite remote and a somewhat limited communications space. Having the remote technology in place means that our various departments and various bases for where we do our operations all within a very sort of patchy environment for communications. The remote technology has brought all that together and meant that we could communicate effectively between departments.
Christopher Reig, Digital Imaging Technician
Where Telstra has helped us, has been to connect our sets, connect our locations, connect everything that we are working on. So that way we're not in dark spots throughout our work day.
Lien See Leong, Costume Designer
We are trying to become sustainable and eco friendly. You still need to be able to download the documents that you need, whether it's a call sheet or for us in particular costume it's all the costume breakdowns. In order for us to continue to try and save the environment we need to have that technology behind us.
Robert Patterson, Executive Producer
Telstra has enabled us to meet the sustainable screens sort of ethos of the production through the fact that we use a paperless production methodology. So all call sheets, excerpts of the script and lots of other documents, maps, other things are all issued electronically. So the fact that we all have great reception, great data, we can access those materials either from our accommodation or while we're travelling to and from locations or on location simply by looking at our phones or other devices.
[Netgear Orbi, Telstra mobile broadband]
We're probably as remote as we could ever be in any location and the fact that it's been a seamless experience really shows that this, this can work, this model actually works.
[Telstra logo]
[Video ends]
Oh, what a stunning location.
You too could go on holidays, and we could keep you connected there so you can't get away from everything.
But keep an eye out for the movie Blue Back, an Australian production, which we've heard is brilliant as well.
So one of the reasons we put on these events is actually the networking.
And by the way, we will conclude today's event with some networking drinks, which is a fancy word for getting together and talking to each other.
But the whole point is to create a conversation and the conversation around the innovation that's happening collectively in this room and the opportunities to drive technology and technology usage in this room is super, super exciting.
And so for us, as an organisation who are here to serve with our partner and technology partners and channel partners is an incredibly exciting opportunity to help you progress what your ambitions are. Now,
I would hope that I am and I am a lover of technology, so it's really easy to get excited about the what that we're helping our customers with and whether it's from our leading networks that better connect your sites using wireless, fixed fibre, broadband, private 5G as a few examples of how Telstra Purple can help you to safeguard your business better and protect your end to end integrated security across your sensors, your network, your devices, and into the cloud.
Now, earlier today in her opening address, you heard Kathryn talk about Australian heavy industries, particularly around mining, energy construction, supply chain and manufacturing and the enormous leaps that those industries are taking in industrial automation.
But actually, it's not just industrial segments that are doing that, it's all segments that are looking in this automation and operational transformation to improve competitive differentiation, to improve productivity, worker safety in particular, and help develop environment and monitoring compliance objectives which are only on the increase.
So delivering this industrial automation is incredibly complex and customers are challenged by their complex and aged I.T. and O.T. systems, security concerns, a lack of digital skills across a multitude of technology areas, and they need experts to help drive the right technology decisions to enable that automation that drives real value and real outcomes.
And so as an example of that, in Telstra Purple, we've acquired two great Australian organisations, one called Aqura Technologies out of Perth, another Alliance Automation based out of Brisbane.
And we also have in conjunction with them a joint venture with Quantium and one of Australia's greatest data organisations, which gives us a unique ability in a digital sense and a digital solution to look at the end to end industrial automation of organisations and help transform some of Australia's biggest companies and most complex industries.
So for me, data, I love data just as a matter of interest.
Last year, we connected an extra 1.35 million objects/devices around this country. That's a 25% increase. So, we are increasing the amount of data that we collect every day. What do we do with that? It's the analytics and how we enable it. It's the automation and how we improve it and interpret and predict patterns for smarter, more efficient operations, which are game changers to many companies and industries.
And so all that tech is exciting. It's the impact of that technology and transforming customers and their outcomes, which is really, to me, the most extraordinary piece. Across the board, we're seeing these sorts of results for our customers. Firstly, an increase in efficiency and productivity. Then you get to choose what you do with that. Improved accuracy and quality of operations, an elevated ability to respond in a more timely fashion to regulatory compliance, which all of our industries are on an exponential increase in. And lastly, an improvement in customer experience. And to me, that goes hand in hand with employee experience because you can't do those two things without doing them together.
And so we begin to see that artificial intelligence. And I'd like to just give a reference point on AI and where AI is heading to. I had the privilege of being in Redmond with Microsoft a few weeks ago and a few other of our great partners I'll mention later. But to me, a quote, if you like, I think I'm allowed to quote him. A number of the people who report directly to Satya Nadella, who I do have a bit of a man crush on like many people do, so this quote is ‘the impact of AI will be greater than the introduction of the internet.’ So if he's half wrong, to which I'm not aware that he's being half wrong, looking at my Microsoft friends. Just think of the size of the outcome of that where AI and Chat GPT and all those things are going.
So I think about the leaps we can make in solution architecture along with more data-effective decision-making tools. We're actually going to see an enormous boom in opportunity, the scalability being designed into our systems, better risk mitigation and compliance. It's going to be an extraordinary outcome. And so we're seeing that sort of innovation driving outcomes and competitive advantage in many sectors.
So we know that tech is brilliant, but it's how it serves your business and the results that it delivers is the most exciting bit. And so those areas that we could explore together in your business are our purpose for being here. And so I'd love to be able to continue those conversations between you, our partners, and Telstra as this event runs on for the next couple of hours.
I'd also like to talk a little bit about something else that we're focusing on. Not only are we focusing on how we can make your organisations better, but we all now have an obligation, a role, a need to make this world, let's just focus on this country, a better place and think of that as ESG, but think of that as our obligation to pay back. And in the very heart of your technology transformation, there needs to be an outcome or an aim of being more responsible, more sustainable in your operations and your outcomes for your company and for this country.
And so like you all, we at Telstra are confronted with the realities of change every day. It's in the news, it's in the conversations we have with our customers. It's in the impact on our environment.
[Slide: Our ambitious new climate change and energy use goals.]
Regulators are asking more of us, and so we all have a huge role in how we make this change. We in Telstra, like you all, take that very seriously for quite some time. From our sites to our operations, our products, and our solutions, we've made a commitment to 50% emissions reduction by 2030. As just one of those examples, we recently announced that all of our Telstra mobile plans are now certified carbon neutral.
While change is important, we're also enabling how we change in our organization might be important, but how can we enable change in your organization so we can help you with your scope 3 emissions. I'm sure everyone in this room is being asked how they help to deliver that for your organization.
Now, we partnered with Deloitte Access Economics to produce a very complex named paper called "Enabling Positive Climate Action" to understand the scale of how telecommunications and technology products can have an impact on climate change. That report says that we have helped in Australia our customers to reduce their CO2 emissions in 2021 by 2.7 million tonnes of CO2.
I'm not quite sure what that looks like. If it sounds like a lot, it feels like a lot. So I like this analogy which we keep using, which is that is the equivalent of 820,000 cars off Australia's roads per annum and the impact on the environment of 820,000 cars less. That's a really important outcome.
I'd like to give you a customer example, Visy, who are a great Australian business with now expanded globally. We worked with Visy a few years ago to help modernize their information storage infrastructure, which is pretty much all on-prem, and we helped them migrate to a lot of cloud servers, both partner servers and Telstra servers, to actually move all of their storage. We then came back a little while later and helped optimize all of their cloud infrastructure. Both of these items that how we helped them optimize that environment enabled them to reduce their data center-related emissions and energy usage by up to 80%, which is a huge outcome.
Another example is how we help in cities and buildings. There's something called HVAC systems. Many of you might know about them that control buildings to help with the temperature control, the energy control, and how we connect all of those buildings around the country. We're well into the 40% range of connecting HVAC systems around this country, and again in 2021, that contributed an additional 552,000 tonnes. Let's call that 120,000 cars. And for every 10% more buildings that we actually get onto HVAC systems, we'll take another 50,000 cars off the road.
So these are the sorts of things that we're all really required, both morally and almost mandated to do, to help this country through climate and climate change. Now, we can only achieve this by working with great partners, and we have the privilege of working with some great partners. But I would like to name a couple of those great partners, and they are AWS and Microsoft who have been great partners of Telstra and Telstra Purple, who you've seen today.
[AWS and Microsoft logo]
They're also our major sponsors of this roadshow around the country. So to Microsoft and to AWS, a huge and big thank you to you.
[Your Business Optimised. Telstra and Telstra Purple logo]
Tech Breakouts
Increase productivity with Microsoft AI
Telstra and Microsoft explored the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in business today. From preparing your data infrastructure and security, to giving employees the right collaboration and communication tools to be more productive. Implement AI and optimise business agility for your dynamic and modern workforce.
Optimise Cloud Security with AWS and VMWare
Telstra, AWS and VMWare experts share current trends, best practices and strategies to improve security posture and deliver higher reliability, resiliency, and improved recoverability of data sets. Together, they present a powerful ecosystem that enables businesses to achieve enhanced scalability, security, and cost efficiency.
Optimising opportunities for business growth with Telstra Purple
Hear from Telstra Purple leaders and experts, sharing insights and examples of how we solve real business and human problems with technology. We prioritise our customer problems over our own solutions and identify the most pressing issues that require attention. Our customers rely on our expertise and consultative approach, often gaining new operational and industry insights.
Optimise The Frontline Worker
Samsung, Microsoft, and Telstra mobility technologies are transforming frontline worker digital experience. Join us to discover how you can consolidate disparate solutions/platforms, increase productivity, drive innovation, and empower your organisation when you optimise your mobility.
Intelligent Secure Connectivity
Networks are more than the connections that allow information to flow between machines and people. They must also be secure. Our panel of experts explore the current trends and look ahead at how data science, data analytics and artificial intelligence might make our networks even more secure.
Customer Interviews
Delivering Excellence in Experience at the Exmouth Eclipse
Erin Walsh, General Manager Mining and Energy, Telstra
Penny Griffin, Project Manager Regional Telecommunications, Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (WA)
Delivering Excellence in Experience at the Exmouth Eclipse
[Title: Your Business optimised. Telstra logo and Telstra Purple logos
Customer Story, delivering excellence in Experience at the Exmouth Eclipse
Penny Griffin, Project Manager Regional Telecommunications, Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (WA)]
Erin Walsh: The moment at 11:29 in April 20 was pretty special. What did it mean to you?
Penny Griffin: This eclipse was not only just a particularly rare kind of eclipse, it was also really unusual that the places that you could see it on land were very constrained. Most of it happened out to sea. So, it started in the southern Atlantic, sorry, Antarctic moved northeast to slice through the Exmouth Peninsula at such an oblique angle that it didn't touch anywhere else on the mainland. Then it passed over more ocean until it crossed West Papua and ended up in the North Pacific. And so, the only two places you could really see it from land were Exmouth and Papua New Guinea. And of course, Exmouth was the better choice 'cause it had a much clearer chance of clear skies at that time of year because of the monsoon.
And while that was great, the problem is that the Exmouth Peninsula is really tiny and it's covered in a really sensitive national park, and there's very little access. And so, everybody that wanted to see it was going to be compressed into a really small space.
Erin Walsh: So, clearly, there was an understanding that the usual sleepy town of Exmouth would need some sort of transformation. When did you get the heads up about the review on the technology infrastructure? And what were the challenges you were faced with?
Penny Griffin: The government, well, actually through eventually the Department of Jobs, Tourism, Science, and Innovation set up a working group in 2020. The agencies involved at the early stages were looking at the logistical and public safety challenges of managing a big influx of visitors to this area, which wasn't really equipped to deal with such a large number. Exmouth normally has a population of 3,000 that doubles in the sort of peak holiday periods. And for the eclipse, we were expecting up to anywhere between 15 and 40,000 extra visitors. So, it was a really big challenge of how we were going to service them and make sure that the event was conducted safely.
Erin Walsh: Did having the world's media's attention as well add an additional layer of complexity?
Penny Griffin: Yes and no. I mean, the world's media are pretty self-reliant when it comes to connectivity. They provision their own satellite feeds, although many of them did take the feeds that came from the live streaming sites through the two observatories. But what that really represented, having the world's media there was an unrivaled opportunity to showcase the wonderful Ningaloo Coast to a truly global audience. You just can't buy publicity like that. And also, to demonstrate the state's capacity to manage a large and complex event in a remote area that actually hadn't been done before in regional WA. So, that was another big plus.
Erin Walsh: So, how did you begin to tackle those problems, though?
Penny Griffin: Well, the first step was we looked at where people were going to be. So, all the accommodation was gonna be full because it was school holidays and it's full anyway. The Shire was of Exmouth was building a temporary campground for 6,000 people on the outskirts of Exmouth. So, that was one location. All the surrounding areas were pretty much chock-a-block. So, that's Carnarvon, Onslow, Coral Bay, Bullara Station. And there was also a lot of concerns about illegal camping on other stations, and particularly the Department of Defence land where apparently there's unexploded ordinance and all sorts of things to worry about if people sneak on.
And so, we needed solutions that actually covered the whole peninsula, not just Exmouth itself.
Once we understood where people were going to be staying, we started talking to agencies about what it is that they needed in terms of their critical communications to deliver services.
Then we started talking to carriers about what they could do. And it became clear really quickly actually that Telstra had the largest network in the area, and it was also the best equipped and frankly most interested to help.
Erin Walsh: So, what were the principles then that underpinned the solution you were looking for?
Penny Griffin: Public safety was the first one. That's not so much about just watching the eclipse itself, but it's the risk of bushfire. If you had to evacuate an area that only has one road in and out with lots of crowds and very hard to know where to send them, we needed to be able to have the capacity to push messages out to people's mobile phones to be able to tell them what they do.
And the other risk, of course, was late-season cyclones, which are a bit rarer at that time of year, but tend to be much more severe. And in fact, we dodged a bullet with Cyclone Ilsa that crossed the Pilbara coast to the north of Exmouth just a week before the eclipse date.
The other big driver was enabling inter-government communications. I mean, main roads sent another 60 or 70 people up to Exmouth to help manage traffic. We had lots of road signage that needed to be connected, you know, the automatic road signs. We had, of course, in John Ambulance, all the emergency services were there that although they can talk to each other, they needed to be through their radio networks. The emergency services needed to be able to talk to other agencies. Jobs, tourism, science and innovation have set up a big control centre. So, everybody had to report in up to eight times a day on what you were doing so that they could keep track of anything going wrong. Of course, there were all the health services, the medical services, bus driver, just lots, lots of going on. So, that intergovernment agency communication was a key factor.
Business support was another one. We had 42 food trucks go to the area. Plus there were lots of market stalls held as part of an event program. And so, they needed to stay connected mainly so that to make sure that their EFTPOS transactions would go through 'cause nobody carries cash. And so, they needed to make sure they could trade to actually meet the demand from the people that were there.
We needed surge capacity. It wasn't just about the eclipse itself. There was a whole event program organized for the entire school holiday period because you don't just drop into Exmouth for half a day. You're generally there for quite some time. And so, with the event spaces, there were three in particular that were built for crowds of 8,000 people. And so, while those events were on that we needed extra capacity for the people that were actually gonna be there.
And then I guess the last principle was about redundancy. We had to have fallback planning positions if the mobile network failed or somebody dug up the fibre or whatever.
Erin Walsh: So, I guess the next question is, what sort of technology solutions did you actually deploy?
Penny Griffin: We honestly, I think, have thrown everything that everybody could think of at it. We deployed eight cells on wheels, which are like full base stations actually, but either on a container or a trailer that was scattered around the peninsula. They were largely powered by generators. So, that had to come with a refuelling program for the diesel to keep them running.
We did look at what programs we had in place with planned investment in the area where we could accelerate the delivery of that infrastructure. And so, we had already funding awarded for a new base station at Learmonth and an upgrade for Coral Bay. And so, we tried to accelerate that to be done before the eclipse timeframe. Telstra itself then accelerated some of its business-as-usual plans and built new base stations just south of Exmouth, one in Onslow. And also, they upgraded the Exmouth exchange. Then we organized the dedicated fibre connection for the live streaming site where Perth Observatory for time and date website and the Gravity Discovery Centre for the feed that went to Yagan Square, if any of you saw that in Perth, that had a dedicated fibre connection.
Of course, lots of staff were deployed, technical staff were kept on site for the entire holiday period. Spares were positioned. We had a lot of active network management in place that if the network was starting to get too congested, voice and texts would be prioritised over video to try and keep as many people connected as possible.
And then with Telstra Purple, we had five Wi-Fi trailers to provide free public Wi-Fi largely at the event spaces. And a proportion of the capacity in those Wi-Fi trailers was reserved, if you like, for the traders. They were given super-secret passwords so that they could access that. So, even if the Wi-Fi was overwhelmed, their EFTPOS would still go through.
Then they organized all the equipment for the live streams. So, there were a whole series of meetings with time and date in Europe and the two observatories in Perth to work out exactly what their technical requirements were for the two live streams. And then that was all shipped up to Exmouth. Telstra Purple actually sent a technician as well to do on-site testing at the live streaming location the day before, which is the one shown on the screen. Oh, yeah, the black box on the right. And then, of course, they were there for the date of the eclipse itself. And just in case something went wrong with the fibre, we had Starlink, we had all sorts of other connectivity options there.
Erin Walsh: The logistics of what you're actually describing are quite mind-boggling, actually. So, what part of the solution most excited you?
Penny Griffin: Oh, well, I worried about it the entire time really, but I think in about the middle of March, you kind of realized that there was just nothing more you could do. Everything we could have been thrown at it. We didn't still have a clear idea of numbers, but we knew that there weren't any bus seats, there weren't any car hire, cars for hire, there were no aircraft seats, there were no more landing slots. The accommodation was full. So, we knew how many would be there permanently. We didn't know how many would just be day trippers, just driving from wherever and be there for the day and put pressure on the mobile network. But when I got to Exmouth on the 18th, I also ran around doing speed tests on all the locations, and actually, the numbers were good. So, that actually felt good as well.
Erin Walsh: And what was the biggest challenge you faced across the whole event?
Penny Griffin: I think the, yeah, the uncertainty about numbers. We thought if it's at the lower end of the scale, we should be OK. If everybody comes, it could still fail. And failure then could have some catastrophic implications depending on what else was going on at the time. And I also worried about traffic gridlock, that there's only one lane in and out of Exmouth. It only would take one accident for everything to be closed down, and that would've blocked access to the livestream and the viewing sites and actually really throw things into a bit of chaos there. But luckily, that didn't happen. I think the final numbers were probably at the lower end of the scale. It's still being worked out in fact, but we think around 20,000 extra visitors as opposed to 40,000. So, that was on top of sort of business as usual. What we had planned was certainly sufficient for that because everything operated flawlessly.
And so, the good news was the sky was clear and the eclipse was absolutely fabulous.
Erin Walsh: So, is there any, as far as the technology solution, how did it perform? Are there any things you would change going forward?
Penny Griffin: It was, the skies were clear, but only that day, they had been cloudy the day before 'cause we kept getting tail cloud from the cyclone. And what they affected was actually the solar power for the Wi-Fi trailers. So, as it was cloudy, they weren't recharging in fast enough for some of the load, but it was OK. We managed to scrape through there.
What needed to change really is that you need to start thinking about telecom solutions way earlier than really what was less than 18 months before the event. Just because the whole design, site acquisition, development approval process, equipment supply is, is just complicated.
And it's very difficult to get things done in a really short timeframe.
So, as a consequence of that, we spent a lot more money on the temporary solutions than I would've liked to know. With more time, we could have delivered more permanent infrastructure. And the permanent infrastructure that we will be delivering, not all of it's completed yet. It won't be finished till the end of the year. So, I think that was a learning from it.
Erin Walsh: And I'm assuming you'll be chasing down the next solar eclipse in 2028?
Penny Griffin: Absolutely. It's gonna be in the Kimberley. The point of maximum totality is about equidistance between Ellenborough and Drysdale River Station on the off Gibb River Road. This one is continental scale. The maximum point is in the Kimberley, but it actually goes through the Northern Territory, through southern Queensland and even right over the top of Western Sydney and Dunedin in New Zealand. But WA will still be the best place to see it 'cause we see it first, we have the best chance of clear skies as it's winter as you move further south. And unlike the Exmouth eclipse, hybrid eclipses tend to be quite short in their totality. The 2028 eclipse will be five minutes and ten seconds of totality as opposed to 62 seconds in Exmouth. So, it'll be absolutely marvellous thing to see and there'll be plenty of vantage points to see it from.
Erin Walsh: And just do you want to share your personal interest in this? Because your knowledge about this stuff isn't just your day job.
Penny Griffin: Ah, yeah. Oh, I'm a bit of an amateur astronomer. I do have a telescope. I take it out and volunteer for public outreach events and I'm on the organising committee for AstroFest.
But that sounds kind of a private thing. For government, I worked on the Square Kilometre Array project for a while with a former agency and so, that is building the world's largest radio telescope right here in the Murchison. So, that's exciting as well.
Erin Walsh: Now, you get some really good projects.
Penny Griffin: Yeah. (LAUGHS)
Erin Walsh: Alright.
We're shortly gonna go to questions from the audience. So, if you can get ready for that, while you can put your hand up, the microphone can be passed around.
In the meantime, I'll...
Is there any other major technology projects, Penny, that you're looking at the moment? You mentioned the array. Is there anything else?
Penny Griffin: Oh, I'll look at our team in regional digital solutions is doing a lot. The one that I'd really like to be involved on that I hope will be coming up is about creating and developing solutions for better digital connectivity in remote Aboriginal communities. That needs to be sort of co-designed process that's really tailored to their needs to actually make some measurable progress on the Closing the Gap Outcome 17, which is about equal levels of digital inclusion. I think that would be a really amazing thing to be able to do. We have experimented with four pilot projects that are really well received. So, it's a matter of just trying to scale that up in a reasonable timeframe with a genuine consultation process, of course, to make a difference by 2026, I think is the Closing the Gap target.
Erin Walsh: Now, you've got a fair bit on your plate.
We've just got a question over here.
Audience: I guess that one being on such a global level and a lot of vision over globally. Do you have any learnings from that for business as usual? So, any of the things you set up there, can you see replication across business as usual? So, for instance, a mine site or Rottnest Island when on a weekend capacity is at its max and you struggle to send a text.
Penny Griffin: Well, for places like that there are, there are sort of constant stream of new technologies coming that, that can address them. I think from business as usual from my agency standpoint is that it was actually quite eye-opening to work so closely with a whole lot of other agencies. We tend to, in government, you tend to operate in quite a siloed environment. You all have your particular portfolios, and you're concentrating on those to work across government and really understand what other agencies are doing and what their needs are. And then to come together to sort of make common cause was a really excellent thing.
And it has built a capability really that WA perhaps didn't have before, where all these people can come together, make common cause and to manage a really complex task. And that capability can be grown and developed for other, well, other events certainly, or even for things like disaster recovery or sort of responses to, I don't know, foot and mouth disease, you know, whatever. That kind of response capability can be developed based on this sort of model, I think.
And also, from our point of view, having building a closer relationship with other agencies and having a better understanding of their needs would logically then lead us to start prioritizing future investments to meet their needs and clients, especially in regional and remote areas, which is our area of concern.
Yeah.
Erin Walsh: That cross collaboration is powerful, isn't it?
Penny Griffin: Yeah, yeah, I do.
Erin Walsh: That's really good insight.
Any other questions over here?
Yeah.
Thank you.
Audience: That was really insightful.
You mentioned before that something of that scale and magnitude hadn't been done previously in regional WA. Is this perhaps something that Telstra and your agency would be willing to put together an architectural overview as to how it was all put together and then provide that to the inter-agencies that work together on this?
Penny Griffin: Well, it certainly does. This was the largest public event. I mean, I'm not saying at least I don't really know. I mean, I suppose if you look at Dowerin Field Days, that probably has a similar number of people, but this was the largest public event for which government was responsible to manage. And I think that Telstra is hoping to build this into a both a case study and a video study. As far as other agencies go, you know, the work isn't over. Now, there's a whole evaluation phase. We're all seeing, making worried about benefits realization and how we can kind of prepare for the next one. So, yes.
Erin Walsh: Now, unless there's any more questions, I think that does bring us to the end of the session. Yeah, flashing over time we're getting there. So, thank you so much, Penny. It was a great session. Thanks, everyone. And I love the insight you gave into that.
[Your Business Optimised. Telstra and Telstra Purple logo]
Delivering Excellence in Experience at the Department for Education (SA), Elders and Adelaide Oval
Rob Frost, General Manager, State Government (SA/NT), Telstra
Scott Placentino, Head of IT Operations, Elders
Dan Hughes, Chief Information Officer, Department for Education South Australia
Steve Frost, ICT Manager, Adelaide Oval
Delivering Excellence in Experience at the Department for Education (SA), Elders and Adelaide Oval
[Title: Welcome back, Telstra, your business optimised
Customer Story, delivering excellence in Experience at the Department of Education, Elders and Adelaide Oval]
Rob Frost: At Telstra. We are very fortunate to work with a diverse array of amazing customers, I should say, across government and the commercial sectors. While the nature of their operations can be starkly different, often the challenges they face are quite common.
In the next half an hour, we're going to explore this idea with three local technology leaders.
Dan Hughes is the CIO of the SA Department for Education and is a seasoned executive with over 20 years of experience within the IT industry. Having led multiple teams to drive digital transformation across government.
Scott Placentino is currently head of IT Operations at Elders and is responsible for delivering effective IT services to 4000 end users in 400 locations across Australia.
Steve Frost is the ICT manager for Adelaide Oval. Yes, he's also my brother, and describes this job as more akin to running technology for a small city rather than a stadium. Please welcome our guests to the stage.
[Speakers on screen. Dan Hughes, Cheif Information Officer, Department of Education South Australia; Scott Placentino, Head of IT Operations, Elders; Steve Frost, ICT Manager, Adelaide Oval]
In full disclosure, when we were planning for this, I said to the marketing team, isn't it a conflict of interest for me to interview my brother on the stage? And they said, Rob, not only is it not a conflict of interest, we think it would be hilarious. So thanks marketing, no pressure on that one.
Steve, I'm going to start with you because I can. I want to ask you about your beautiful Adelaide Oval. We might think of the role of technology there being about giving us punters access to wifi, running the video scoreboard, and processing payments for pies and a beer. But it's so much more than that, isn't it?
Steve Frost: Absolutely. I guess you've touched on the quota time crush that we experienced during major events, but when it's not a major event or people running around the ground, we have a hotel business, a cafe, a bar, another cafe, Atomomado Zoo, as well as a 138-room hotel. We have to accommodate. On top of that, we have 2000 casual staff, as well as 200 permanent employees that we need to manage all the IT and requirements for as well. So there's quite a bit happening.
Rob Frost: I understand you also had some real legacy issues to overcome. What were they and how did you go about addressing them?
Steve Frost: So, due to COVID, I guess the decision was made to split the assets a little bit longer at Adelaide Oval. The legacy issues we had to I guess overcome were the ten-year-old equipment that was installed as part of the 2013 redevelopment. So we really, over the last 12 months, were working with Telstra Purple and our partners and Cisco now to really reset our foundations and build again from scratch. I guess, you know, faster connectivity would replace everything from our network switches, our core switches, all the access points, IPTV, and really set ourselves up to have this great foundation of infrastructure to take us into the future.
Rob Frost: You're not responsible for the goalpost technology are you?
Steve Frost: Mark Ricciuto isn't in the room yet, is he?
Rob Frost: No, not yet. Right. Yeah.
Scott, if I can bring you in now, I know you too had a challenge when it came to updating and unifying your IT network.
Tell us a little bit about the Elders business and why you felt the need to invest.
Scott Placentino: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Rob.
Elders are the largest Australian-owned agribusiness in Australia. We've been operating for over 180 years, serving the Australian farming community, so it's something we're really proud of.
Part of my team's challenge is to deliver connectivity and network services out to 400 locations, and most of those are in regional and remote areas. So obviously challenges around that.
So we made an important decision about a year ago to modernize our telco networks, and we basically moved from a traditional Telstra MPLS network. So thank you, Rob, and Telstra for that. Been holding its in good stead for a long time, but we chose to modernize to a Cisco SD-WAN network, and that was really a decision that was made because the wider Elders business had a strategy to modernize our traditional trading applications to the cloud. So we saw the future was coming. We really made a conscious decision to modernize our networks to make sure that they handle the rigors of cloud-based connectivity.
So for us, next week, we're going to implement the 50th branch for Elders over to SD-WAN, and we've seen really good performance uplifts across those 50 sites. So it's been really exciting.
Rob Frost: Congratulations on 50 sites. That's awesome.
Can you tell us a bit about the options you reviewed in getting to the right solution?
Scott Placentino: Yeah, sure. So we did an external market benchmark process which basically involves, you know, a telco consultant that we worked with for many years that knows our business really well, knows the market really well. Basically benchmarks Telstra's offering of Cisco Meraki, so what's in the market. So from a solution perspective and also a costing perspective, that gave us really good intel as to what the best solutions were out there, gave us a really good opportunity to negotiate with Telstra, refined the solution down and gave us confidence that we had the best solution in the market at the price point that we got.
So it was a good process and it's a great result.
Rob Frost: And I'm sure you put us through our paces as well.
Scott Placentino: And we did.
Rob Frost: Absolutely.
And then the digitization of student education has been happening at such a rapid pace here in SA in the past five years, obviously underpinned by the SWIFT Network. The importance of what you've been doing came right to the fore during COVID lockdowns when schools across the state moved to remote teaching and learning.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you'd embarked on before COVID and what needed to happen when this massive pivot was thrust upon the entire education community?
Dan Hughes: Sure. Thanks, Rob.
So we had a bit of a unique situation in that prior to COVID we were grappling with how do we get 950 sites to participate in things like online learning.
So we did a bit of a review of our systems in late 2018 and worked out at that point in time. There's only 7% of our schools that were connected to what we would consider as being enterprise-grade Internet.
I'll let that sink in 7%, so we had a bit of an issue, first and foremost to make sure that schools could participate with Naplan online, and that sort of set us on a rapid journey with in partnership with Telstra, Cisco, Saasyan, and Palo Alto, to come up with a solution that we could, A, fix the connectivity issue that we were faced with, but then also establish a mechanism that would have a greater line of sight to the bandwidth activity within schools and pre-schools leading up to the COVID period.
So with that in play, we were very, very lucky, if I'm honest, that we had completed a large majority of that work. And that meant that when COVID did kick in in full earnest, we were well prepared and schools could make that decision in terms of, okay, what were the settings that made sense for them and how would they participate given the push then to move to online learning.
So without that work, without the partnership in place, we would still be struggling now.
Rob Frost: Thanks Dan.
Each of you has quite different management environments gaining the kind of IT investment required for each of you must have been challenging.
So I think we'd all like to hear a little bit about how you went building the business case to justify and secure the right level of investment.
Steve, I know that you have a few masters across the Oval and its stakeholder groups. Maybe you could share your approach with us.
Steve Frost: Yeah.
For those who probably don't realize that Lenovo Study Management Authority, who I report to, work with is a not-for-profit. So we have a unique set of challenges that allow us to operate within. We've been very fortunate that for ten years since the redevelopment of Adelaide Oval, Telstra and the Telstra Plaza, they've been naming and technology partners for Adelaide Oval.
From our perspective, we worked and aligned with Telstra to define the scope of what a refresh looks like, given it's ten years since the original upgrades were done. How we can fit that within I guess a modest budget and really then work with Telstra stakeholders to go out to market, find the best solution based on industry standards similar to what the other panellists’ approaches were and really define, I guess, the opportunity cost of doing this and buying the technology that was being, I guess, promoted or presented. And also the I guess the opportunity cost of not doing it. We wanted to make sure that lost, a ten-year investment.
We wanted this to last a long time but also be scalable and future-proof our needs. Once we had the right partner chosen, in this case, it was Cisco to expand and refresh the existing Cisco environment we had there, we were then able to put business cases forward through to our executive team, through our steering committee, and also to the board for the release of the sinking fund.
Rob Frost: Okay, great.
We all know in business complex projects, business-ending complex projects, outstanding solutions just don't happen in isolation. Maybe, Scott, this opportunity to expand on some of the partnership with suppliers and your in-house teams and how they underpin the success to now get to 50 sites and moving on through the rest of the 350.
I know you work closely with Telstra, so maybe you can expand on that for us.
Scott Placentino: Yeah, sure. One example was working with the Telstra Purple team, so they helped design our SD-WAN network. We basically brought together internal IT teams, including cybersecurity, very important, get security on board early, and we worked really closely collaboratively with Telstra Purple. We had quite a compressed timeline to get the design process done. So if we didn't have that collaboration, where we were working in silos, we would not have hit the timelines so we really, you know, challenged each other to really make sure that the design was right for our business. And we ended up delivering on time to budget, which is always something that senior management appreciate. So I got the good result in the end.
Rob Frost: Yeah, fantastic. And thanks for touching on security. It's a question that we'll come to later, which I'm sure will be of topical interest to the audience.
Dan, what about what didn't go to plan? How did you respond to missteps or overcome barriers to your success, particularly with the COVID curveballs?
Dan Hughes: So it probably wasn't a matter of missteps. It was probably just a recognition that we didn't have all the answers right. So we had to quickly overnight, sort of, as we all did, send our corporate user base home to work from home in settings that were very uncertain for us.
So I guess the main thing for us was who could we lean on to help us and to guide us through something that, as I said, was going to have to transform the way that we worked. But also, you know, the way we were looking to teach our kids.
So with that in mind, I don't think we took any missteps. It was more a recognition, as I said, who can help? So I can give you a golden example of one of those scenarios when COVID sort of hit its straps, I remember, the Premier wanted to engage with all of the teachers in our system, so they wanted to run a webinar, which we didn't have the technology and have to do that to make sure that teachers understood what they were required to do through a very uncertain time.
So, you know, without sort of putting too much wind in Telstra's sails, it was Telstra who stood up and said, hey, we've got something that you could potentially use, let's have a look at it, let's test it, let's see if we can sort of make sure that it meets your needs. And quite quickly, we were able to establish a platform and then a mechanism to effectively communicate with our entire 30,000 strong workforce, which was, you know, huge for us at the time.
So I guess it wasn't a matter of missteps. It was, as I said before, just making sure that we knew that there were willing partners who wanted to help us solve problems through that period. And it was about us sort of understanding ourselves so that we didn't hold all the skills or the expertise and then we needed all the help we could get.
Rob Frost: Thanks, Dan, and you can put the wind in our sails anytime, don't worry about that. Obviously, a bit of the theme today around Optimise is we talked about this earlier that the pace of change being so unrelenting, it's vital to ensure new systems are adaptable, scalable, and future-proof. So I'm keen to hear from all three of you on this one.
What measures or approaches did you take to ensure what you're building for today's needs was going to meet future demands? Maybe Steve, do you want to start with this one, with what's happening at the Oval, things like e-sports, etc.?
Steve Frost: Sure. Prime example is we reset our foundation and we look forward to events and what may come down the pipeline for Adelaide Oval and what we want to put both in our function center, our function rooms as well as what's happening on the field.
So things like e-sports, digital broadcasting, or IP broadcast, which is becoming more and more prevalent overseas, these technologies will come to Australia very rapidly and we want that our network and our environment to be prepared for that. So working with the Telstra and the Cisco's who work in this space constantly, the ability, the opportunity I’ve had through previous roles to go visit other stadiums both in Australia and internationally as well, to say this is what the future is going to come, this is coming to Australia and making sure we're ready for it.
Rob Frost: So you get to fly around and go to footy games for a job?
Steve Frost: No, not footy games. NFL games. I get to look behind back of house basement level of stadiums. It's not as exciting unfortunately.
Rob Frost: Sounds like a real tough gig.
Now I'm lost.
Scott, maybe you could expand on that a little bit further, mate, with where you're going with your SD-WAN and how do you see setting yourself up for the future?
Scott Placentino: Yeah, sure. So we're on the systems modernization journey to cloud, and that's going to happen over the next few years.
So we definitely had a future state to aim for, and that gave us a lot of good requirements around how do we enable our network to meet those future needs.
And as well as that, Elders is on quite an acquisition path at the moment. We are bringing on new businesses, and my team has to spin up their networks very quickly, and we're finding with SD-WAN we can spin up a site within half an hour, whereas before it used to take us a long time. Obviously hardware permitting, you need to have the hardware there, but we can basically, we've got a co-managed solution with Telstra, so we rely on Telstra to help us, but we can quickly and easily spin up a network if we need, and we're finding that agility is really good around getting those requirements that come in at the last minute; we can spin something up quickly and make sure that it's safe and secure as well.
Rob Frost: I remember we used to refer to it as painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge, mate. Rolling it? Yeah. Half an hour is incredible. That's amazing. Thank you for that.
And Dan, obviously the foundations of Swift, which you've talked about, what's next? How are you going to build on that?
Dan Hughes: Yes, so I should say that that 7% figure I'd shared with you before is now 99.6%, so all, bar, two of our schools are connected to dark fiber, which has been awesome not only for our own visibility and confidence when you consider their engagement with online platforms. But the things that our schools are now doing because of the foundation work is sort of going next level.
So in terms of what's next for us and part of that consortia arrangement that I explained before, it wasn't just about dark fiber; it was also making sure that we had line of sight to student behavior and making sure that we understood how certainly the bandwidth is being utilized, but also what sort of preventative measures could we take when you consider things like student behavior and student bullying and those sorts of things.
So I guess with the consortia arrangement, we use a product called Saasyan which now sits on all of the end points, if you like, of all of our sites. My team then has full visibility and monitors that capability significantly. So now the attention to things like how do we utilize that and to be a bit more preventative, when you consider what does the role of AI play in that? And is there an opportunity for us to explore that out so we're not reliant on just alerts and those things; we actually get in front of problems, which is an interesting paradigm for us.
Certainly, the notion of building on that layer of confidence that schools now have, we're now seeing a massive uptake in online tools that schools are using. So it's about how do we make sure that we're making the right investments in some of those tools and how do we ultimately secure them going forward to make sure that the heart of what we do, our students, are protected, certainly from the outside world.
Rob Frost: Great. Thanks for touching on AI because we'll get to that one shortly.
But we are going back to what Scott mentioned in terms of security.
So security is a massive issue for all of us. As stated earlier, we'd like to get a sense from each of you about how you ensure security was front and center in your planning, deployment, and ongoing management.
So maybe, Steve, you want to kick that one off?
Steve Frost: Sure. We redeveloped and rearchitected the whole security framework for the new network and infrastructure that we put in place. We simplified the existing network that had been evolved over the last ten years.
I guess complexity is the enemy of security.
And we have a complex enough environment as it is across our businesses and all the different levels of systems that sit on our network.
So we really wanted to streamline that.
We've made investments into our, I guess, management layers of security and applications around Cisco DNA, Cisco ISE, and really want to streamline and automate as much as we can in regards to our users, what they need access to, when, and really define what is happening on our network.
Rob Frost: Great.
Scott, how far is security involved in your network project as an example?
Scott Placentino: We were best friends for the whole project, I think. I mean, security is definitely not my area of expertise.
So we definitely leaned on our cybersecurity team; they brought in some guiding principles around security by design, and that we held first and foremost in the design process, and they were consulted along the way in conjunction with Telstra Purple, so everything was around what is our requirements around security and enabling a branch network.
So that was definitely front of mind, made sure that that was important.
And I think if you don't engage the right stakeholders initially, you can run into some trouble, and if you don't design things correctly, you can get too far down the line and then realize, oh wait, we missed that, and it's hard to go back. So made sure we put the effort in upfront.
And security with the Department of no? They were very much open to finding ways forward.
Yeah, we've got quite a new team at Elders have come in as well, and they’ve been really great to enable some key projects for us.
So we do work quite closely in the CIO group; we have different service delivery towers, but we do work quite collaboratively together.
Rob Frost: Yeah, Fantastic.
Dan with student records and remote devices operated even by families. So not just the student but the families as well.
And some of the things obviously we see in the media with doors coming off and videos of things and stuff. Obviously, security might be a unique challenge for the Education Department too.
Dan Hughes: Yeah, it always is. It's a yeah.
So, so certainly, as I said before, if we're not focused on securing access to a student and then fundamentally securing data, then we're not doing our jobs.
But what we have done, though, I guess is we've taken a bit more of an enabling approach to how we go about doing that.
I think traditionally, you know, when you consider maybe sort of five or six years ago, we were very much risk averse. The answer is no. And here's the reasons for that.
So I think our approach has really shifted.
And once again, this has been because of the level of technology that's now available for us.
You know, in monitoring school environments, we're now sort of focusing on, okay, what can we do with that that enables a better experience, a better end-user experience for our teachers?
But then how do we also make sure that we're creating the environments that, you know, we can allow students to innovate in, in a way that the guardrails are there, that the safeguards are in place.
But ideally, we want our students to sort of create and innovate.
So that's been, I guess, the fundamental shift for us is making sure that we're doing that with that sort of UX to be in mind, but also that we sort of now understand, okay, with schools by virtue of who they are. That's the sort of nature of what they do. They innovate, they create.
So how do we make sure the right sort of settings are in place to enable them to do that?
Rob Frost: Yeah, great.
Just before we get to the Q&A and we do want to hear from the audience so start preparing your questions now, please, for our guests, since we've got a room full of business leaders here, I'm sure you'll agree that AI and obviously listening to Brad here earlier as well is incredibly topical given the rapid rise of the online platforms like GPT.
Can you tell us a little bit more about your own experiences with AI in your organizations to date?
Dan, I'm going to set you up here, mate, because you are plastered all over the news with your edge chat, I think you're calling it, etc.
Maybe we could start with you and you can tell everybody about how you sort of how that started and where it's gotten to today with the support of Microsoft.
Dan Hughes: Yeah, sure. So I'm not sure if you can see my beard. It used to be brown, but now it's pretty much white. So essentially we were faced with a fairly unique prospect when chat GPT first hit its straps really in November last year.
As you may have seen, the media at that point in time, when you consider other jurisdictions nationally and globally were quick to ban the use of generative AI in schools.
We were the only jurisdiction in this country and one of the only ones across the globe that said, well, no, we want to embrace it. So that's that was absolutely for us the right thing to do.
I'm not disputing that. But where I have gone grey is how do we then sort of make sure that we can enable, as I said before, students' use of generative AI in a way that protects them and alerts us to some of the things that could go wrong in that environment.
So to cut a very long story short, we leant heavily once again on our partnership network. And we realised sort of late last year that Microsoft were obviously doing a heap of work in this space, as we heard earlier before, and we wanted to explore what could it mean for us if we created our own version of Chat GPT.
So fast forward to now, you may have picked up on the fact that we released an eight week proof of concept for about 1500 students, about 150 staff across eight schools where yes, we have built fundamentally a replacement for Chat GPT with things like student behavior in mind and with access to data in mind, so everything without getting too technical comes back to us, we’ve created it within our environment.
It harnesses the power of open AI so therefore the richness of the answers that our chat bot provides is the same as what you get with Chat GPT. But the difference is when you can at the moment trick Chat GPT to telling you the ingredients for Napalm, for example, or Crystal Meth, our variant sort of picks up on that and make sure that we're not providing students with that level of information, giving, as I said, our attention to some of the safeguards that we've created around it.
So that's been incredibly powerful for us. Technically, it's proven that, yes, we can sort of take a step forward to ensure that students can engage with a chat bot of that nature safely. Certainly the learnings and the proof of concept concluded last Friday. So we don't have all the learnings yet, but certainly the way that teachers are now using that capability not only to save themselves time, but to ensure that they have then more meaningful sort of lesson plans that can create those sorts of things. It's pretty full on what they're now looking to do with their use of that tool. Ethically and have we sort of make sure we manage the sort of media frenzy that that sort of, you know, generates from what we're doing, that's the challenge for us at the moment.
So we have created a steering committee which our Chief Executive steers to ensure that we can consider things like what are we communicating to our parents, how do they participate in that process? And ultimately, what sort of settings do we look to deploy to ensure teachers know how to enable and sort of start to adopt the use of this technology? Early days, but certainly the fact that we now have the capability is exciting and the use cases that are starting to emerge from that proof of concept are really, really quite powerful. So we're really keen to explore what the next steps are.
Rob Frost: Thanks for sharing and maybe we'll get some questions from the audience at that point or you'll be very popular at networking drinks later. Happy to have a beer.
Scott, AI, in Elders, are you playing around with it?
Scott Placentino: Like Dan, we're sort of in the discovery and learning phase where we're understanding more about it and we've got a couple of opportunities in the pipeline we will run some trials on and but probably the only thing we have currently is we use AWS Connect for our call center operations for service desk and that has some native AI and ML capability in that tool, which allows us to start looking at call sentiment analysis, so people call in and they're a little bit upset. We can get the analytics from that that triggers an event off to the lead to maybe perhaps get involved in that phone call and help out.
So it's starting to give us real-time analytics and give us a real good visibility as to how the operations are going. And that's been good for us. I think we'll look to expand that a little bit as the time goes on.
Robe Frost: Yeah, fantastic. Steve, AI at the Oval, another goalpost joke in there I'm sure somewhere.
Steve Frost: No, not this time. So, you’ve already stolen that. So Adelaide Oval we have I guess our corporate back of house technologies and ways to drive our business. And then we also have the more fun front of house solution.
So back of house, Adelaide Oval, are sort of using it for snappy content and generating some, some graphics sort of. We're still working through what that looks like from a business perspective, but we've invested in AI from a point of sale perspective through some products from Ashton basically is, you know, it takes you longer to get your wallet out of your back pocket to scan your drinks and send you on your way. So we'll put it in some of our key kiosks and bar areas. 16 seconds is the average transaction from dropping your food. Let's say I do it scan, tapping account and walking out. So our goal is to get people back to their seat during those busy quarter time, half time crush areas where it's just packed in the outlet, get you back so you don't miss any of the action.
Rob Frost: Great. Thank you. We've got a few minutes left, so we might open it up to Q&A from the audience if we've got any questions for our panelists, there's got to be a question. I was hyping them up before about how they wouldn't talk AI and security and stuff almost. It’s the goalpost joke. Guess they all know. No, nothing. No one's no one's brave.
Yes at the back.
Audience: So with Chat GPT are you restricting access in your organisations to that platform in particular, and how are you monitoring that stuff, using the service and how you controlling data loss prevention?
Dan Hughes: Yes, it's a great question. We haven't restricted the access to Chat GPT because we wanted to sort of make sure that we stood true to the messaging that we established when we said we're not going to ban that use of generative AI on the back of the proof of concept. What we're hoping, though, is that the educators, our students then participate more in the bot that we've created, noting that does the same thing, but essentially has those guardrails in place. So in terms of monitoring, we utilize certainly a as Rob referred to before, our product called SWIFT, which is essentially that sort of Internet layer. So we know how it's being used within chat GPT but all the richness we get within our own version comes back through our dashboard as we know how students are integrating it in their learning and also what that then looks like in the teaching perspective. And we can block it if we choose to. Some schools, we've given schools the opportunity to sort of, if they weren't ready to have the conversation around Artificial Intelligence, then we've had school to sort of make that decision themselves in terms of whether they choose to sort of block access to those tools. So we're still going through, as I said, the learnings. I guess as an early steer. We do see this being released more systemically. And then to answer your question, then my preference then would be that we then look to sort of fully transition to our own variant as compared to using the open AI version.
Rob Frost: We’ve probably got time for one more.
Audience: Sorry, I’ll extend that to, say, Elders and Adelaide Oval. How are you guys doing it as yet in your company?
Scott Placentino: We haven't blocked it but we're monitoring it closely.
Steve Frost: Same, yeah, absolutely.
Rob Frost: Thank you for the question. One here at the front it's got a roving mic.
Audience: Easy. I’ll just yell. Okay. On the use of machine learning, I just wanted to expand on how it actually operates?
Steve Frost: Yeah, we train a lot of our products, multiple poses, so it allows for quick recreation, a quick transaction. It also learns based on where you drop it, where it's like where it's placed, where the items are placed on the tray. And it really just continues to learn based on variances how, how crumpled, how many chips are on the packet of chips or how someone's put the bacon on the burger. You know, if someone makes a burger, same burger five different ways. So it continues to learn and we continue to train it. So it allows for speed of transaction.
Scott Placentino: I’ve used that service at Adelaide Oval it's fantastic, thumbs up.
Steve Frost: It’s all we want to hear, happy customers.
Rob Frost: Thanks for the question.
That actually brings us to the end of our session today. So can you please thank our guests, Steve Frost, Scott Placentino and Dan Hughes."
[Your Business Optimised. Telstra and Telstra Purple logo]
Delivering Excellence in Experience at Unity Water and Longreach Regional Council
Ben Rogers, General Manager, Telstra Enterprise, Business QLD, Telstra
Bronwyn Fox, Metering Services Manager, Customer and Community, Unity Water
Michael Ballard, Senior Information Technology Officer, Longreach Regional Council
Mitch Ryder, Chief Operating Officer, PCYC Queensland
Delivering Excellence in Experience at Unity Water and Longreach Regional Council
[Title: Your Business optimised. Telstra logo and Telstra Purple logos
Customer Story: Delivering excellence in Experience at Queensland Police-Citizens Youth Welfare Association (PCYC), Unity Water and Longreach Regional Council]
BEN ROGERS: At Telstra, we are fortunate to work with a diverse array of amazing customers across the commercial and government sectors. While the nature of their operations can be starkly different, often the challenges they face are quite common even if the solutions deployed are not.
In the next half hour, we're going to explore this idea with two local technology leaders who Telstra is delighted to be supporting in different ways.
Michael Ballard, Senior Information Technology Officer, Longreach Regional Council, which covers an area of more than 40,000km² in Central Western Queensland, and Bronwyn Fox, Business Integration Lead Unitywater, who provides safe and reliable drinking water and sewerage services to more than 360,000 customers across Moreton Bay, Noosa, and the Sunshine Coast.
Please make our guests welcome.
[Mitch Ryder, Chief Operating Officer, PCYC Queensland; Michael Ballard, Senior Information Technology Officer, Longreach Regional Council; Bronwyn Fox, Metering Services Manager, Customer & Community, Unity Water]
BEN ROGERS: Michael and Bronwyn, thank you so much for joining our panel today.
Bronwyn, do you mind sharing a little bit about Unitywater and the key challenges you are facing and the ambition you had to resolve them?
BRONWYN FOX: So, for Unitywater, I think there's some key focus areas that we're looking at at the moment, and it's about sustainability and customer focus.
So, in terms of sustainability, we constantly have drought on our minds. So, it looks like we're going into another drought phase, so that's something that's really on the forefront of our minds.
And from a customer-focused perspective, we've seen our customers go through a lot in the last few years. So, going through Covid, going through increasing, you know, pricing and financial pressures there.
So, one of those key focus areas is how can we help them further as well.
So, now that we've actually deployed the 10,000 smart meters that we have out there, and we did that as a trial, we've seen a lot of success in that area in terms of sustainability and customer focus.
And one of those key areas for us is we've been able to save our customers $1.7 million dollars and 344,000,000 litres of water across a two-year period. So, when we think about sustainability across 10,000m and a larger scale rollout for Unitywater, I mean that's a win for sustainability and it's a win for our customers.
So, we've got a large growth phase I guess as well for the region. We anticipate that we're gonna have close to a million customers around 2031. It's predicted around that. So, we think we've done this now. What does the large-scale rollout look like, and how do we actually support that growth over time?
BEN ROGERS: That's amazing, Bronwyn, and congratulations. That's fantastic for your customers and for the environment, obviously.
Michael the size of Longreach Regional Council, it must have some significant challenges from an ICT perspective. Can you give us a sense of what these were and what was in place before you embarked on a technology change program?
MICHAEL BALLARD: Yeah, being in a rural environment definitely has some unique challenges. I had one on the way down here myself just recently. There's only one flight from Longreach to Brisbane per day. They disembarked my luggage while I was on the plane, so when I arrived I essentially had the shirt, I'm wearing, the shoes I've got on and I borrowed a pair of pants from my brother last night. So, here we are.
BEN ROGERS: I like your red docs.
MICHAEL BALLARD: It's a unique challenge, but you're correct. There are challenges that probably many councils haven't faced or businesses as well. It's not just the distance. So, our sites are spread across many hundreds of kilometres. So, we've got several sites that are 150km away from the main centre and a few more sites that are 300km away from the city centre or I say city, but you know, 3,500 people. But it creates a disconnect from the ability to get technology and readily and easily deploy it at these locations.
I mean, you could be talking six hours round trip just to get there and back, not including the work, not including trying to get the equipment and the equipment could take days to even arrive. Then you've still got to configure it and get it there. So, that presents unique challenges itself. Also, hilariously enough, the wildlife presents its own challenges, not just the exciting kangaroos and emus, but koalas and galahs love to chew through cabling systems like you wouldn't believe. So, they will eat anything right down to the copper wiring, so they will strip down your microwave and radio links and create absolute havoc. And usually, they're stored in the highest possible place that you can get to, which makes them enormously inconvenient to get to fix. So, it does have its own challenges. As you can understand, we've had radio and microwave and a variety of technologies trying to bridge the gap between these remote groups. So, that was part of our idea of seeking help from Telstra itself.
BEN ROGERS: Great. And I know from living in a region myself, we had some floods at Proserpine and you might have seen on the news a crocodile swimming down the side of the highway. So, we do have some challenges in regional Queensland, that's for sure.
Bronwyn, can you tell us how technology was being used to support business operations before your IoT rollout?
BRONWYN FOX: Sure. So, we undertook a couple of smart meter trials early on and that was back in 2015 and they were quite small. So, we did some logger and integrated meter technology, and it was only a thousand of each, and we gained a lot of lessons from that. But otherwise, in terms of we had access to sort of loggers and things like that, but it was really just on a case-by-case basis and it was quite, I guess, siloed in that respect. So, when we introduced the 10,500 or 10,000, our smart, I'm just gonna say our asset strategy specialist threw a couple more in there. So, you know, it's ten and a half, but let's just go with ten. So, 10,000. When we rolled those out, we actually rolled out data lake technology as well. So, we learned a lot of lessons from those trials. You know, now we've brought it into the 10,000 trial data lake technology. And now that gives us that foundation that we can actually start building and optimizing with. So, it's been a great success for us.
BEN ROGERS: Perfect. Now, each of you have very different stakeholders and management environments. I'm interested in how you went about getting support for the kind of IT investment that you're required. Bronwyn, can you tell us a little bit about getting support in your organization?
BRONWYN FOX: Yeah. Well, I think because we had gone through the trials, the smaller trials, the ten and a half or the 10,000 rollouts was probably an easy sell because what we wanted to do was look at the benefits that we perceived, I guess were there or based on other utilities and what we were seeing in that space and be able to test that. So, we were able to do that with the 10,000. And then that's going to help us get to that next stage of what's a large-scale rollout look like now that we've been able to test 10,000 different setups in terms of above and below-ground type setups, you know, concrete walls are a bit of a challenge and being able to test all of that technology at the same time. So, yeah. So, it was probably an easy sell 'cause we needed to do something. We needed to get there and...
BEN ROGERS: Pilot business case, it was just in front of you and how could they say no, right?
BRONWYN FOX: Yeah, right. And now we're in that space this year where we'll be delivering a business case for a large-scale rollout.
BEN ROGERS: Awesome. Michael, what was your experience in council?
MICHAEL BALLARD: Ours probably wasn't as hard as you'd imagine either. For a good while, it was hard to get buy-in from council. There were always do more with less. Do what you can with what we have. It was always very frustrating. But over the last several years, as everyone may notice, when your CEO or mayor goes to different conferences, they come back with all these great ideas and says, "Let's do this. We're gonna make it happen." And you go, "Oh my God, right. Yep, we'll do that with less." So, over the time they've actually seen the technology changes and how far behind I guess we've become 'cause in the last several years it's increased rapidly.
So, there's an obvious disconnect when they're going to different conferences and it doesn't have to be somewhere like Canberra or Brisbane or Sydney. It can be somewhere like Rockhampton or Townsville or Cairns that it's obvious that there's a disconnect between ours and what they have and how rapidly that gap is increasing. So, we managed to get buy-in from the council with essentially a few CEO and mayor conferences going, "Oh my god, we really need to do something." And we work with them. And they came to the table fairly easily and we worked with Telstra to develop a plan. And when we did the business case and said to them, "Look, this is going to cost us nothing, it's going to make everything better, everyone will be faster, you'll be better, and also it'll cost us nothing." And they went, "Yes, that does sound good for council. Let's do that."
BEN ROGERS: And by the way, I think there is a local government thing going on at the moment. So, when you get back, there's gonna be all sorts of stuff for you to talk about. (LAUGHS).
I wanna talk about speed of change. So, often we think about major tech transformation projects. There can be a feeling that it's gonna be a long and complex process. Michael, I've read that your project implementation was really seamless and rapid. Can you give us some insight into how the project rolled out and what surprised you most about it?
MICHAEL BALLARD: Mhm, It sounds like a sales pitch, to be honest, I'm not really that comfortable talking about it. It went surprisingly smooth, which was the concern, to be honest with you all. In IT, nothing goes smoothly. If it does go smoothly, it means that you've just missed the problem and you need to keep looking. But after, say, seven months now, I can say that it's good. It's OK. There were no problems. So, it was a fairly rapid transition. Our longest part was actually waiting for the hardware. It just couldn't get delivered in time. That was when we were still having the hardware shortages. Everyone was probably aware you couldn't get iPads, you couldn't get the technology, you couldn't get UPSs. It was just difficult to get anything at the time or there was a six-month wait for everything. So, the longer part for us was actually getting the hardware from the manufacturer to Pinnacle IT to do the configurations. So, I think the entire project was between five and six months, and I think we were waiting for about two months for the equipment to be delivered. Once it was delivered and configured, it was shipped out to us very quickly. We worked with Pinnacle IT, our Telstra partner, and we were having weekly meetings or bi-weekly meetings to go over the project plan, which was developed by Pinnacle IT in consultation with us. It went very smoothly. We did a lot of testing, we delivered to the sites. We were informed every step of the way. We were told when it was dispatched when it had arrived; sometimes I wouldn't even be there and they'd ring me for confirmation that it had arrived on site. And I'm like, "Oh, I assume it's there if you're ringing me, I'm not really sure." So, they were really on the ball when it came to delivery and follow-up to make sure it had arrived. We did a cutover phase of some of the smaller sites, so we have sort of 13 major sites. So, we chose the smaller sites to do cutovers. The smaller site cutover in less than three minutes; our larger site cutover, I'd say seven minutes for the full cutover. But most of that was probably me unplugging cables and plugging the cables into the new infrastructure.
We actually had a user on the phone during the time I was actually cutting the cables over, even though they were told not to be on any devices or using the network infrastructure for seven minutes because users really care.
BEN ROGERS: Just did it anyway, right?
MICHAEL BALLARD: They just did whatever the hell they feel like, but they didn't even drop their telephone call during that cutover process, which I found fairly impressive, to be honest. I did not expect that at all.
BEN ROGERS: That is amazing, and I did not pay him to say anything nice about Telstra. That is definitely his experience.
Now, collaboration and teamwork. We all know in business complex projects outstanding solutions don't happen in isolation. Bronwyn, how did teamwork and partnership with suppliers and in-house teams underpin success for you?
BRONWYN FOX: Well, I have to say that actually, everything really did go smoothly for us, and probably to call out is that we had double the amount of work. So, I agree. Like it actually went quite smoothly. It sounds like yours did; ours did as well. However, with our 10,000 smart meters, we deployed two networks, and then we had different loggers and integrated meters on those networks, which then gave us two platforms. And then of course we had our data lake which we introduced, which was great. So, we had double the amount of work probably as part of that process. And I'm a big believer in people support what they help create. So, we did extensive engagement with each of the vendors, suppliers, our installation partners were fantastic. And it all went really smoothly from, you know, from end to end. But the other call out, I guess I wanna make is that we went about this trial with a "we don't mind failing" approach. We rolled it out without expecting immediate returns. So, if we actually ended up failing in something, we'd have learned something. So, fail fast, learn fast, and change fast. So, that's what we did, and we still went really smoothly. So, we're very happy with the outcome and the support that we had.
BEN ROGERS: Thanks, Bronwyn.
Here's an opportunity to ask our panel any questions from the audience. Anyone brave enough to stick their hand up? We've got a question in the front.
AUDIENCE: (INAUDIBLE)
BEN ROGERS: We've got a mic coming. Run, Jackie.
BRONWYN FOX: Run!
BEN ROGERS: Don't fall over, whatever you do.
JACKIE: I thought this was karaoke.
AUDIENCE: You said a couple of times that it was free, but you're waiting on all the hardware, so I presume that was more of a total cost or return on investment kind of free rather than actually free. Can you explain that a bit more?
MICHAEL BALLARD: Yeah. Telstra said that if I came up here and said nice things, they wouldn't charge me. (LAUGHTER)
BEN ROGERS: That's not true.
MICHAEL BALLARD: No, no. The way we worked it out, you're not wrong with the return on investment, but we also leveraged off our Telstra tech fund.
So, the actual cost of the hardware itself that we were waiting on to be delivered, we actually used our Telstra tech fund to eliminate the cost of that hardware altogether, so we didn't have to pay for any of the configuration or hardware. We just leveraged off our tech fund to eliminate that cost. Realistically, there was a bonus on top of the limit. Once we'd taken the tech fund and eliminated that cost, we'd also got a return on investment of tens of thousands of dollars on top of that. And the next year after that was actually an even greater savings. So, I think we ended up saving 30 to 60,000 the next year, and our third year, next year will actually be a greater savings yet again.
AUDIENCE: (INAUDIBLE) Like a planned solution.
MICHAEL BALLARD: Yeah. So, if you work with Telstra and purchase through Telstra, you'll accrue a tech fund that you can use for innovation. This was used as an innovation fund essentially because it was a major change in our infrastructure. We were gaining visibility, security, Palo Alto, Network firewall, VeloCloud, security visibility that interlinked all our sites. So, it was definitely an innovation that we could leverage off.
BEN ROGERS: Any other questions? One over here. Jackie, over to your right, to your right.
AUDIENCE: Hello. I'm just curious about the two different technologies. So, has the council got one sort of technology, and there's another technology from Unitywater, or is it a combined solution? I'm not quite sure. Didn't quite get how that sort of worked.
BRONWYN FOX: So, Unity water deployed two different technologies, so two different networks. So, we went with the Telstra network and we went with Suez Wize 169. So, that was an opportunity for us to test both of those. And then of course, we put different technology in terms of loggers and smart meters on each of those networks to see what worked best in various scenarios. So, what's fit for purpose for Unity water was really a focus point for us. As I mentioned earlier, like, you know, on the coast, we have large, you know, high-rise complexes and their master meters might be in basements, in concrete walls and things like that. So, the goal for us was to be able to test different devices on the different networks and then be able to find out what was fit for purpose for us.
AUDIENCE: And does that sort of work with the council? You work with the council on that to integrate that technology.
BRONWYN FOX: As in Unity water?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
BRONWYN FOX: So, we're owned by the council. Unity water, our councils are our stakeholders, and so we are across the Moreton Bay, Noosa, and Sunshine Coast regions. So, we are a separate entity, and that's why we didn't need to engage because Unity water owns that infrastructure.
AUDIENCE: So, you weren't part of the project with Longreach Council? Was that a separate project?
BRONWYN FOX: No, separate projects.
AUDIENCE: OK, that's fine.
Just trying to clarify, I couldn't quite understand how that sort of worked. Thank you.
BRONWYN FOX: You never know. There could be some collaboration in the future.
BEN ROGERS: Should get on the VeloCloud. We've got time for one more question. I can see one down here, Jackie, straight ahead.
AUDIENCE: This is a question for both of you. If you had your time again, what would you do differently? And what did you learn from the experience?
MICHAEL BALLARD: I can go first.
Look, if anything, I probably would have approached Telstra sooner than I did. We probably left it. Not a little late, but we were struggling probably for longer than we needed to be struggling before we brought it to Telstra's attention and worked through our account manager to help put us in contact with Telstra Purple, who helped us develop the contact with Pinnacle IT to develop the overall SD-WAN adapt infrastructure that we implemented in the end.
I don't think I'd change much. The cutover was very seamless and smooth. It just probably would have been how long I left it to actually pursue Telstra for assistance rather than anything that went wrong during the project itself.
BRONWYN FOX: Not a lot because of the approach that we took in that it's a trial. One of the things that I would probably like to see is being able to probably just spend a bit more time in looking at the processes. And so we did a lot of work around the change impact assessments. So, we did that up front, but we leveraged existing systems, and if there was maybe a longer period of time to be able to do that, I'd like to have probably put a bit more effort into that area. The processes and that change.
But we did it with the approach that we're going to change as minimal as possible. And then for our large-scale rollout, we're going to, you know, make sure it's scalable. But yeah, there's a few processes that didn't quite work in-house, if you know what I mean, that we found some gaps in. So, but really everything went quite smoothly.
BEN ROGERS: Thanks, Bronwyn.
That brings us to the end of our panel session. Please thank my guests, Michael and Bronwyn.
Thank you.
Thanks, Bronwyn. (APPLAUSE)
[Your Business Optimised. Telstra and Telstra Purple logo]
Delivering Excellence in Experience at Jemena, JG King and Melbourne & Olympic Park Trust
Kathryn Purcell, General Manager - NFP and Community Services Southern Region, Telstra
Pratham Bhandari, GM Digital Market Platforms, Jemena
Simon Blakeney, Venue Manager - AAMI Park, Melbourne & Olympic Park Trust Matthew Thornton, CIO, JG King
Delivering Excellence in Experience at Jemena, JG King and Melbourne & Olympic Park Trust
[Title: Your Business optimised. Telstra logo and Telstra Purple logos
Customer Story: Delivering excellence in Experience at Jemena and Melbourne & Olympic Park Trust]
Kathryn Purcell: At Telstra Enterprise.
We are so fortunate to work with a diverse array of amazing customers. The nature of their operations can differ, but often the challenges they experience are very similar.
In the next half hour, we're going to explore this idea with ICT leaders.
I would like to introduce and welcome to the stage Pratham Bhandari, who is the General Manager of digital market platforms for Jemena, one of Australia's leading energy and utility providers who support millions of households and businesses with essential services every day.
Also, Simon Blakeney, Venue Manager, Melbourne and Olympic Park Authority, who have just completed delivering a string of FIFA women's World Cup games.
And last but not least, Matthew Thornton, Chief Information Officer of JG King Homes, the largest builder of steel frame homes here in the state, and building approximately a thousand new homes every year.
Please make my guests feel welcome.
[Pratham Bhandari, GM Digital Market Platforms, Jemena; Simon Blakeney, Venue Manager, AAMI Park, Melbourne & olympic Park Trust; Matthew Thornton, CIO, JG King]
Okay, guys, I'm going to jump straight into it.
Simon, you're going to kick us off. Let's start with the FIFA Women's World Cup. It's just been run and won, and I'm sure everyone can agree Spain was amazing. But also go the Tillies. But you've been in game mode for quite some time with FIFA. So please tell us about what FIFA required of you and your precinct and the biggest challenges you faced in meeting their demands while continuing to deliver an amazing experience across Amy Park.
Simon Blakeney: We actually started planning the FIFA Women's World Cup back in 2017, so an early bid submission back then as we formulated what to do, and what we found was planning for something in 2023 when we were talking 2017 was actually quite a hard task. We didn't know what our requirements were going to be, what our customers wanted when they turned up. So a big part of our planning was actually starting on that. What do we have at the moment that's going to Telstra came in and helped us quite a bit. But what we found was we actually were behind the ball. We actually really didn't have Wi-Fi networks, we didn't have integration with our network systems. So a lot of the work that we did was actually saying, Well, what do we want to do? How do we improve the standard? But what's coming? We didn't really know what was coming in 2023. And by the time it got here, there were some really big challenges and some hits and misses along the way. But what we found was the best thing for us was actually being a part of a great tournament meant that everyone wanted to jump on board so we could deliver a great outcome.
Kathryn Purcell: Thanks, Simon.
Pratham, I'm going to bring you into the conversation now.
The project you've been collaborating and working on with Telstra Purple and a range of key partners hasn't really had the visibility.
That the Women's World Cup has had. But tell us a little bit about the challenges that you face in your energy metering business.
Pratham Bhandari: Sure, Kathryn. And for a change, I don't mind not having that visibility for my project, so it's good.
But Simon, you touched upon the approach that you have in order to introduce what Jemena does. We have a robust network of gas metering technologies in New South Wales where we saw 1.4 million customers to solve their gas energy needs.
In terms of the network paradigm, once we had the advancements in advanced metering infrastructure in electricity for our gas network, we were impacted with the network paradigm such as 3G, which are not fit for purpose in the future.
And if we talk about the data transfer technologies they are aging, the infrastructure behind the scenes are getting to its obsolescence. What this does is it really gets the billing inefficiencies where customer satisfaction and a degraded compliance posture for us.
So for me here as a leader, there are three clear challenges, probably be opportunities, I would say.
Number one, you touched upon Kathryn early on ESG, our commitment to ESG sustainability is a given. It's a necessity. Security we cannot compromise on. And safety's a non-negotiable.
So if you keep that in mind and look into the industry 5.0 at the heart of it, because some expectations are now needing access to data to be able to make more meaningful decisions.
And only not long ago we are seeing the overall cost of IT Solutions are now lowering and technology is rapidly maturing. So the idea here is that how do we have a trade-off between affordability and durability and how do you use the ecosystem of partnership in this room to be able to use the timing of the industry to advantage? So that's the way we approach that problem.
Kathryn Purcell: Thank you, Pratham.
And now, Matthew, I think JG King's optimization project started with a specific problem in mind, but it took a very different path once you engage Telstra and our partner.
Matthew Thornton: That's correct. We started out by just wanting to put construction software on iPads and that was digitalized workflows and meeting with Telstra and being introduced to BluBiz We, which is a partner of Telstra, we found that there was a broader strategy that needed to be deployed and they helped us make that a reality.
So we actually, in the space of 24 to 36 months, rolled out an MDM solution and an adapted mobile solution. An SD-WAN solution to over 42 plus sites, we also rolled out Microsoft teams, we also rolled out Okta MFA. So it was very, very busy period and managed service desk. And we also set up a long-term security strategy. So it's very, very busy.
Kathryn Purcell: Well, I'm going to take that security and now we're going to deep dive into that link.
So how did you ensure security was front and center in your planning and deployment and ongoing management? Matthew, can you kick us off with that?
Matthew Thornton: Yeah, I think it's really important at the start. Like I'm sure a number of people here realize that there's no silver bullet for security. It's an ongoing task.
We all measure essential aid, policy, strategy, governance and all those sort of things. So you have to be agile and you have to be, you know, constantly moving with the times. And it's very important to engage experts outside of your team that have got their finger on the pulse and know what's going on in the wider community or industry.
So we did that. It helped us set up a very robust solution. And then from there what we did was we started the VAP testing it and making sure it was living up to what we expected.
Kathryn Purcell: Thank you, Matthew.
Pratham, how about for you have a security part of it?
Pratham Bhandari: Well, Matthew talks about the platform site security. And I'd like to quickly touch on the great intelligence, the security that's acquired in the field side of things at the device level and the edge computing.
We are now exposed to one already, such as over the air hijacking of our phone, whereas eavesdropping and the physical asset security, that's often being overlooked at the moment.
So in our case, we went through a rigorous process, a rigorous process of compliance, getting ISO 27,001 certifications and also introducing a data governance framework where we can actually secure customers personal information and sensitive operational information.
One example is how can we really embed the SIM cards into a hardware rather than having it pluggable to prevent tampering on the field site? So physical assets security was at the prime here.
Kathryn Purcell: Thank you, Pratham. Now, Simon, what does security mean for Amy Park?
Simon Blakeney: Yeah, we as venue operators always take the idea of security is putting a security guard into a position. And that's how we start is our first line of defense when we get to technology, it’s a whole different bandwidth. And for us, we can actually turn our lights on from our mobile phone so that the spotlights come on for a broadcast. Then that opens up a whole new plethora of boxes of challenges for us in terms of security. So a lot of the long term planning that we got into is how do we actually provide the ability to provide a secure environment that we can operate the stadium no matter what time of day or night, but also when we welcome thousands of media and thousands of international guests, we don't know what they're bringing on an event day. The media tend to rock up and say, We're here and we need access. So we need to be able to plug into your solutions, broadcast in particular. And so a solution that was almost in the stadium and specific to that, but also the ability to quickly tap on problem solve and find out ways where we can actually allow the broadcasts to go out to hundreds of countries worldwide.
Kathryn Purcell: Thank you.
All right. We're going to move now into collaboration and teamwork. We all know in business, complex projects, outstanding solutions don't ever happen in isolation. So how did teamwork and partnership with suppliers and in-house teams underpin your success? Simon, do you want to kick off?
Simon Blakeney: Yeah, the FIFA’s Women's World Cup ended up with close to over every event, nearly a thousand people working on that event at the stadium. So it's massive numbers. But really our core team that delivered it at the stadium was a core team of about 30 people. So we rely heavily on industry experts and leaders to actually pull that together. And the team's main focus is actually not on delivering the event as such, but how do we pull the best of all these people and then collaborate? Now, collaboration sounds all great all the time, but actually it comes with its challenges of making sure that everyone's got their say. But also we have to make a decision, we have to push forward. We can't keep discussing it and how do we make sure that the people enable feel empowered to make that decision and move forward.
Kathryn Purcell: Thank you, Matthew?
Matthew Thornton: Yeah, for me people close to my heart and you know, you always, especially like ours where we've got a smaller IT team, you try and get as many skills into that team as possible, but you always remain generalised in your skill sets and I think it's important to bring in those resources from trusted partners and that's what we did. We had people who could run projects and manage and they understood the technology. But then we brought in the expertise through our partners to do that. And, well, we had a lot of projects and and it went well. It was good. And the other thing that I think is important is your partners are not just partners. They are part of the team, we would have stand up scrums, we would have weekly IT meetings, all those sort of things and get them invested in the process as well. They are obviously, but really invested because they understand us.
Kathryn Purcell: Wonderful Matthew, thank you for sharing and Pratham?
Pratham Bhandari: I think couldn't agree with Matt and Simon more. And the one aspect that I can add here is the current digital landscape is driving fundamental shift in business structures today where we have to move from. We can do this alone from we have to build this together approach. And this collaborative approach is no longer optional. We can't do this alone. So we need to realize that. In our case we partnered with Telstra Purple who brought other for the market expertise from Nucleus3 as professional services. We go invested into a local hardware manufacturer, promoting Australian jobs to co-create an interoperable, scalable and true device diagnostic solution. What stands out the most is and I think Simon, you touched upon that is such collaboration from in this case, Nucleus3 and Telstra Purple gives us access to all the new skills in one stop shop Iot engineering, software engineering delivery management skills critical in design thinkers. They are all there. And what this does is that it frees up our internal people their valuable time to absorb themselves in transitioning and synthesizing the change rather than driving the change.
Kathryn Purcell: Thank you.
All right. To everyone in the audience, I'm just calling out. We're nearly ready for Q&A, so please get your questions ready. That will be shortly. Someone running around with a mic for you to be able to ask your questions of these three amazing men. But while we give you a chance to think of those questions, one final question from me. How did you how did you include future proofing in your solutions? The pace of technology is changing and it's so unrelenting, it's vital to ensure that new systems and projects are adaptable, scalable and future proof.
What measures and approaches did you put in place to ensure that this project would meet future needs and demands?
Matthew Thornton: Well for us it was understanding what our business objectives are all about and engaging the right partners. Again, like I touched on, you can't have every expertise in-house. And you know, some of the things that we mentioned, like AI we're exploring that now where we can actually render a floorplan or render a facade of a home and, you know, or transcribe meetings and so on. So it's about getting the right partners in place to enable you and people you can trust that will give you the right information so that you ensure what you're rolling at today is future proofed down the track. And it lasts his whole life cycle. So it's a trust, but it's also, you know, a very strong, you know, negotiation partnership type model and, you know, falling back on those meetings and building the rapport I think is very important.
Kathryn Purcell: Thank you, Matthew. Simon?
Simon Blakeney: Look, I think for us, the big thing and the big key thing was all about how do we make sure we've got a legacy item you can you can build everything for one big FIFA event, but how do we continue to make that last for all our hires day in, day out. But it also comes with its challenges putting in that kind of infrastructure that we actually aren't going to need to use for the next 3 to 4 years before we host another international event actually makes some of that stuff redundant. So where do we look at how do we make sure that we've got enough things that we need for a tournament? And we had some misses along the way. We made a big call early on not to do WiFi in public areas across the entire stadium because we kept thinking, you know what, 5G is coming. Now 5G is coming, but it's not here yet as a general consumer for 2023, but we made that decision more than 6 to 7 years ago when we talked about it. And we knew that because of that, we made some misses along the way. You're agile, adjust, put wi-fi networks in its most critical location - ticketing, food outlets, bars where people will actually want to watch something or need access to something and then adapt along the way and move, so it's about that continual change.
You never going to get it right.
So how do you quickly adapt and change and bring everyone on that journey?
Kathryn Purcell: Thank you Simon. And Pratham, How did you do this?
Pratham Bhandari: Yeah, sure.
Look, I think it's important for us to move away from a traditional head and software mindset where they could be rigid, they could be proprietary. And I think this is where we have to move into platform as a capability mindset.
And I'm glad that we're getting into a platform as a service internally where we are now able to create applications such as device management, run analytics, transact and store data securely at all tiers, beta,d, grid intelligence or at the systems level.
But what's more exciting for me is not the power that would be unlocked with the technologies such as machine learning and data science. We can now for the first time for our guest network and correlate and aggregate information from hundreds and thousands of sensors and make, make, make sense of it.
It's now giving birth to predictive maintenance operations such as we could we could now read heating values, pressure monitoring, checking the corrosion status of our pipelines and then even look into predicting gas leakages for our customers. Right? So that's pretty exciting.
So I think, Vanessa touched in the morning, this is going to give birth to future innovation and what it does it also gives an opportunity to uplift the skills of our people so that we are ready for a true data-driven decision-making organization. That's pretty exciting.
Kathryn Purcell: That is very exciting. Thank you, Pratham.
All right, open to questions.
Do we have any questions out here? Hands up. Come on. You can't all be shy. One, Thank you. Up those stairs right at the back.
Audience: Thank you so much for the presentation and for showing some detailed information about how you're running your operations.
My question is around how do you see AI playing a role in the optimization of the network that you're talked about in IoT devices, specifically talking to regional areas where there is limited network connectivity using narrowband? And the second part is how do you see responsible AI being embedded into your operations? Thank you.
Kathryn Purcell: I think that's for you.
Pratham Bhandari: Well, I'll give it a shot and I expect my panellists will back me up here. I think you make a interesting point from a regional customer base. We need to now rely also on two hybrid of communication protocols. I would believe narrowband IoT probably would not be foolproof, but how can you then use satellite comms or dedicated 5G comms ideas just coming in the future and investing into a telecom mission partners together so that we can bring that connectivity? That's connectivity.
In terms of AI I think we are at the early stages and when I say you can back me up from your point of view as well, but I think it will also require Co-Investments to create those platforms. As I mentioned early, the first things first, I think we need to get our data stores, databases and data readiness intact and then we have generated a plethora of applications that we can put on top. So I think I think we in the nascent stages, but I truly do agree with you, it has got a big role to play from here on.
Thank you, Pratham.
Kathryn Purcell: All right, we are nearly at time to each of these three amazing guests, I'm going to issue one last question. What are the results that you and your team are most proud of?
Can you quickly share that.
Matthew Thornton: Yep, I'm very proud of what JG King Homes, Telstra, and BluBiz have been able to achieve together. It's scalable, secure, it's maturing, you know, it's multilayered and it's come a long way. But one really, really excited about is the future and what we've done to the customers experience. The customer experience has been digitalized. It's now on a journey and it reinforces what our goal is for our customers and that is to build houses they love. So, you know, going forward, I think like I mentioned, those AI components, bringing that more into our business and also I think as well along the lines of the, you know, the scalability that that will bring you know, I think there's going to be two businesses out there. There's going to be one that embraces AI and makes a lot of change and moves a long way forward and then there's going to be another business that goes, no, I'm staying back. And I think the putting will be in the proof sort of thing. It will be good.
Kathryn Purcell: Thank you, Pratham. What are you and your team most proud of?
Pratham Bhandari: Three things employee experience. Be able to relieve our people from redundant tasks such as manual meter reading and invest their time into more valuable tasks and all at the same time maintain worker safety. That's one. Number two is improve our building efficiency posture, which should improve our customer satisfaction. And finally, the cloud computing is bringing the agility and scale that's required and futureproof us for the next 5 to 10 years.
That's pretty good.
Kathryn Purcell: Thank you. And Simon?
Simon Blakeney: We were we were lucky to be hosting six events as part of 56 across Australia and New Zealand, and for us our biggest success was that we didn't let the team down. Melbourne put on a show, but so did the rest of the country both countries, Australia and New Zealand, and it showed the rest of the world that we can run events. We don't have the backings like some countries have billions of dollars to run these tournaments. They actually run them on a bit of a shoestring budget in the scheme of things. But we can do it and we can invest in technology and we invest in our stadiums and infrastructure and deliver great events with great experiences for people live and at home.
Kathryn Purcell: Wonderful.
That brings us to the end of this session. Can you please thank our amazing guests, Matthew, Simon and Pratham."
[Your Business Optimised. Telstra and Telstra Purple logo]
Delivering Excellence in Experience at Sydney Water and Woolworths
Patrick Viney, GM Sales - Agribusiness, Supply Chain and Retail, Telstra
Dr Christoph Prackwieser, IoT Manager, Sydney Water
Patrick Misciagna, Technology Director - Service, Operations & Infrastructure, Woolworths
Delivering Excellence in Experience at Sydney Water and Woolworths
[Title: Your Business optimised. Telstra logo and Telstra Purple logos
Customer Story: Delivering excellence in Experience at Sydney Water and Woolworths]
Patrick Viney: Thanks, Natasha, and good afternoon, everyone.
Let me introduce our two special guests to the stage.
Our first guest is Dr. Christoph Prackwieser from Sydney Water, one of the largest water utilities in Australia. He is the IoT manager for Sydney Water. Sydney Water is responsible for providing water, wastewater, stormwater, and recycled services to more than 5 million residential and commercial customers across the Sydney, Blue Mountains, and Illawarra regions.
I'd also like to welcome to the stage our second guest, Patrick Misciagna, technology director from the Woolworths Group, which means he's responsible for the ICT needs of iconic Australian brands, including Big W, Primary Connect, Countdown supermarkets in New Zealand, as well as our local Woolworths supermarkets. Please make welcome our guests on stage.
[Dr Christoph Prackwieser, IoT Manager, Sydney Water; Patrick Misciagna, Technology Director - Service, Operations & Infrastructure, Woolworths Group]
So before we kick off, just a reminder that we will have time for some questions at the end of the session.
So Christoph, perhaps we could start with Sydney Water. As a customer of Sydney Water, we've probably all had experience with blocked drains, leaky pipes. But I guess at Sydney Water, that means something completely different. Can you give us a bit of a sense of the size of the network that you're operating and some of the pain points and challenges that you've been experiencing?
Christoph Prackwieser: Yeah, sure. Good afternoon.
Yeah. Sydney Water, a large utility. We operate in the metropolitan area here in Sydney. We've got about 50,000km of water and wastewater pipes to monitor, which means a lot of things can go wrong. And we all have been impacted by wastewater overflows, blockages, main breaks. So, and our challenge is that obviously most of those pipes are underground, so they're really difficult for us to assess and inspect, and it's really difficult for us to know what's the condition of those pipes and are they working properly. So most of the times we are really reliant on our customers, and traditionally our customers called in and reported issues that somewhere there's water in front of my house or there it smells a little bit funny. So we said, OK, we can't be that reactive anymore; we need to get more proactive. And to be more proactive means we need to get at the really at the cause of the issue, at the failing assets, and putting assets and putting monitoring solutions, IoT sensors on those assets, gives us the first time really the means to see how is the asset performing and detecting issues before they really impact the customer and the environment. And that's what we're doing with a big rollout, for example, with our sewer blockage detection where we put around 26,000 devices in those sites which report to us then if there is an issue or not.
Patrick Viney: Great. Now, Patrick, retail, there's a lot of technology that is having a major impact on customer experience whether that be data and insights, whether it be our online shopping behaviors, our click-and-collect services, not to mention operational logistics. Can you tell us a little bit about the scale of the IT systems you're responsible for? And I guess what's been the focus for you over recent years to enable that technology to deliver on some of those business outcomes?
Patrick Misciagna: Sure. Hi, everyone. I just want you to realize that there's three things every human needs, food, water, and shelter, and you've got two-thirds covered here today. So, shelter is on you. Yeah. So as was described before, Woolworths, both here and in New Zealand, we cover probably over 3000 locations from stores, distribution centers, and office buildings. And that is real-time inventory shifting, real-time deliveries, and, as I always say, over the 2000 plus years of doing retail, it went from, in that 2000 years, the technology innovation went from an abacus to a cash register to an electronic cash register. And then ten years ago, that all changed. And, you know, whether it be the new technology that was available to us plus the new way that people want to interact and how to shop, how do they want the conveniences of shopping, the technology rose to that demand. So now you can start your order online, you can pick it up in the store, you can have it delivered in the store, you can pick it up in the boot of your car, you can do research. Eventually, you'll be able to have your shopping list on your phone and then have lights indicate in the aisles where you can go pick up food. But there is no end to what we can do, including data to tell you so you're not getting rewards for baby diapers when you don't have a baby. You've never bought a diaper in your life, why are we sending you these rewards? Just using data for all these new, complex, and more convenient ways to shop. So it's a very large environment. It's over $1.2 billion worth of physical assets that we manage just on the infrastructure alone. And that just keeps thousands of trucks running, the thousands of stores running, and every one of you good people fed.
Patrick Viney: That's great. So, look, today we'll be hearing a lot about strategic advice and collaboration. Christoph, perhaps you can share a little bit about the journey that you've been on rolling out this new IoT infrastructure that you're rolling out on Telstra's IoT network and in particular your collaboration with Captis that are an Australian manufacturer of monitoring devices.
Christoph Prackwieser: Yeah. So around six years ago, we started our journey with IoT, firstly, testing a lot of different use cases, a range of devices, also different networks. So we still run LoRa Network in western Sydney and Wollongong. But shortly afterward, we realized that to give us the full flexibility of IoT to put our devices wherever we want them or we need them, it's really an advantage to have a telco-operated network like NB-IoT/Cat-M1. So we started exploring what's the right device to put in a sewer manhole. You need to imagine that's one of the most challenging environments. We put a device in a concrete chamber, a meter underground. Usually, those chambers are in bushlands, they are in areas where the reception is not very well from the beginning on, but we really have good experience. So far, we deployed 11,000 from around 26,000 of those devices, and they provide us with a real benefit. So they really turn the needle for the organization. We detect more of those blockages, which means less impact for the environment and less negative impact for the customer. And regarding partnership, one of my worst experiences at the beginning of the project was when we failed to connect one of our devices to our platform. I had to facilitate a debugging meeting with a modem chipset producer, the device supplier, a telco supplier, and the cloud environment supplier. So me as a water utility member had to deal with all those people from different parts of the globe. And that's really where we realized it makes sense to have at least one partner to cover big areas of this end-to-end data flow and especially with Telstra where we use the Captis device as a kind of data logger for our sensors. We use the NB-IoT network and Cumulocity. This is really for us an advantage because we've got one phase to deal with. And if there is an issue then it's quite easy to sort it out for us.
Patrick Viney: That's great. I think we all take just opening that tap and getting water for granted sometimes. So Patrick, when we first started working together, it's been a little while now. Some might say too long, but I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that either. Not in public anyway. At home with a have a box of chardonnay, who knows what I would say.
Absolutely. But I heard this term everyday is Christmas. And I thought to myself, long lunches, presence every day, this is going to be a fun team to work with. But that's not exactly what you mean, is it?
Patrick Misciagna: Yeah.
When I first joined seven years ago, like I said before about the $1 billion at that point of infrastructure was 84% end of life, end of support.
We had just come through a lengthy, competitive situation with some of our competitors and it was save as much money as you can, yadda yadda.
And what our availability was in the stores, a key figure that we measure our availability was somewhere around 79 to 80%.
And to give you an idea of that, one percentage point of availability for a store equals 100 lanes being down. Let that sink in.
So, if you remember probably ten years ago if you were a customer of Woolworths, you'd walk in and you'd see either automatic self-checkouts or pause lanes broken down and you'd have to find another one. Not a very big inconvenience, but at a high trade period it would be a very big inconvenience for you.
So what we would do, what the team would have done was set out a swap team of sorts, spend millions of dollars right before Christmas and Easter to what we call bring out your dead. The store would come out and say all this stuff is no good and can you fix it? Can you replace it? Replace batteries and RF devices, and we would do that big rush right before Christmas.
And I started in October and we were doing this as soon as I got there and I said, "It just doesn't make sense. Why do we only treat our customers that well during Christmas? Why is every day not Christmas?" Now, the irony of that whole saying, which is sort of famous now, is that we're actually closed on Christmas. So it should have been every day is Christmas Eve, but anyway, I digress.
But immediately we went and I think within six months we went from a 79 to 80% availability to, and I'm very proud of this, 99.7% availability. So at any given moment across our fleet on all of the lanes, we have less than 100 lanes down, less than 50 lanes down. And as you know from shopping, that is not an inconvenience, but we are still addressing them immediately when we get ahold.
And I think that kind of attention doesn't just go for our stores, it goes for our distribution centers, our infrastructure, and then we carry that on to our partners. And I think the every day is Christmas and that whole mode of almost every one of our partners, hopefully, are also customers. They might not be dedicated 100% all Woolworths customers, that's fine, but they are customers and you can't help but say, "Well, we're doing this for all of us and we're doing this for the customer."
And it's a very complex environment to maintain, but complex, not complicated, right? So, there's always a way to do it and we're very proud of the partnerships we've had and the work that we've done to be that stable.
Yeah.
Patrick Viney: No, that's great. So let me just think about what we just heard around cyber security.
What we're seeing is a proliferation of devices, we're talking in our water pipes, we're talking in our stores, which then drives an ever-increasing attack surface for you.
So, if I think about both these organizations, they fall under the Critical Infrastructure Act. And accordingly, that means cybersecurity needs to be top of mind for you.
So, and maybe Christoph I'll start with you. Can you give us a bit of a sense about how you go minimizing this risk?
Christoph Prackwieser: Yeah, sure.
Yes, you said City water is a utility. We operate critical infrastructure and therefore we've got our special rules anyway.
And I liked what we heard before in the session. So every one of our employees has more or less in the forefront of their mind that the solution we put into practice needs to be secure from the outset.
For example, we do not just look at cybersecurity, we also look at the physical security of our IoT devices. That's quite a change. Usually, our scatter system we run scatter since 25 years, all of those instruments are on Sydney water, land, or protected by some enclosing.
So they are from the outside already quite difficult to get to whereas our IoT devices, they are in the wild. We've got digital meters in your front yard, you've got those sewer blockage devices in access chambers quite easily to access if you want to touch sewer at all.
So this level of protection is not given so we need to see how we protect those devices.
So usually, we have special tamper alarms and we observe, obviously the data we get from those devices.
Then we've got all the other, I don't want to go into detail, but all the other cybersecurity levels like whatever, VPN and private APNs and stuff.
And last not least, obviously, data security is a big thing. We collect a lot more data. This may not be that important for sewer level monitoring, but when we go into the space of the monitoring of usage of customers, of our private customers and commercial customers, it is a big thing.
Especially we had, for example, customers like a chicken farm which they know how much water we use is our IP. We don't want anyone to know this, so we need to go to this next level, obviously, also for those devices.
So all in all, like every one of our applications these days, security is like safety on the first priority.
Patrick Viney: Yeah. And I think that's one of the things is there's the cybersecurity and there's also the physical security that needs that comes into that.
And I'm thinking, Patrick, in terms of some of the supermarkets, you know, we've certainly seen on the news a lot of physical security issues with some of the staff.
And so I know Woolies have been looking at deploying a number of devices to help with that security.
So, where does cybersecurity fit into your thoughts around how you protect that network?
Patrick Misciagna: Well, obviously, it's front of mind.
Everything that was just said minus the sewers.
Hopefully.
But yes, as a physical security, which is ever growing and always on the top of our mind, but then there's the camera technology, the AI technology that is used and that has brought in huge amounts of IoT whether it be a camera or a sensor or a smart gate, smart trolley, all of this technology.
And look, you can say you're secure and you can hope that your partners are secure, but the best way to do that is to isolate early detection on the IoT devices, for example, that are in the refrigerators in a store.
That is for all good purposes to keep the coolant down, the energy down, etcetera.
But that is an open target for everybody.
So, if we can keep that on a separate network and then just pass the data across, that's the type of mentality we use. So isolate each one of the IoT separately and then feed it back through a VPN or through another type of access point so we get the data we need, but we don't have it sitting on our core network. That's just an example of how we do it.
And I know it's a cliche, but security starts at the very beginning in the build and it needs to be run throughout. It's silly to say because everyone believes that they do it, but the second you drop your guard and you release a small little IoT device out, someone will make your world a living hell for doing that. So, it's constant attention to detail.
Patrick Viney: Absolutely.
So, as the saying goes, the road to success is never a straight line.
And Patrick, would you like to share a little bit about your journey with Telstra and some of the challenges and successes that you've had over the years?
Patrick Misciagna: Sure.
We're friends now, right?
Patrick Viney: Mostly.
Patrick Misciagna: This was before your time anyway. But as I said before, when I came on board, it was about stability and it was about building trust with our customers and building trust with our businesses. And one of the key things I came up with, the top ten number one priorities, if you remember that, one of those priorities was to reconstruct our contracts so that we have more fit for purpose and we get what we pay for in a contract.
In the Telstra relationship, you obviously provide all of our network connectivity to the source, circuits to the stores. And yes, it's a complex world. People hit telephone poles, people dig before they dial. People do all of this stuff and the lines go down. But our contract with Telstra was for 99.X% uptime. Because you weren't delivering that, we had to then go spend 12 or $15 million on secondary backups in each store with 4G backups to make sure the customers were served.
And I'll spare some of the details, but you guys weren't very happy about having to pay the penalties every month on your SLAs. And I held my ground and I think to this date, I'm not a very calm person, Italian from New York, so I let my full Italian New Yorker come out. It was one of the very few customers I've ever thrown out of a building and walked out of the room on. And I just drilled down and told you, this is what you signed up for, this is your business. You either do it or pay the fines or we'll get someone else to do it.
And to your credit, you took that very much to heart. The team went back, recreated, and I'm not talking about just recreating a contract, they went back and recreated the entire service. I'm sure people in this room are now benefiting from that work. I wouldn't want to take credit for that, but yeah.
Patrick Viney: Of course not.
Patrick Misciagna: Of course not, yeah, but. But you've built a better mousetrap and we stopped charging you your penalties and the businesses stayed up. So, that with the newer Telstra purple who have become, you know, almost a right arm for us, I have seen an amazing turnaround in Telstra over the last five, six years and my hat's off to you because there were times where you say is not straight the road, this was scissor jacked type of road. But it has been an incredible journey and I commend you all very much for that.
Patrick Viney: And thank you.
Patrick Misciagna: You're a very strategic partner for us now.
Patrick Viney: Thank you for being so candid because I think sometimes we do sit here and we expel the values of everything that we do but, as you said, it's not always that simple and with a lot of the complex businesses that we need to deal with, we need to think about how we collaborate and how we work better together.
Patrick Misciagna: We're always a pleasure to deal with though, right?
Patrick Viney: No you guys are fantastic. I think we'd all agree with that.
So look, we've come to that part of the session where we will invite some questions from the audience.
So, if anybody has a question, we'll have some people who are walking around with mics. Anybody interested in asking Patrick or Christoph a question?
Here we go. We've got one over here.
Audience: Question for Christoph.
So as the planet continues to heat, and it will do because we are past the point of no return, Patrick, you touched on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which got me thinking as it heats, we're going to face a few issues. One will be the unpluggable energy capacity gap. The other one will be around water and the ability to source, retain, and recycle clean drinking water for the city. Now, it seems to me the natural resource that the planet provides flows primarily into the ocean and into the harbor. So I'm interested in what are the strategies that Sydney Water has in place to be able to retain water as the planet continues to heat and the technologies that you're exploring as well.
Patrick Viney: Oh, that's a great question. An easy question to start with. Over to you, Christoph.
Patrick Misciagna: We were thinking more of what's your favorite color?
Christoph Prackwieser: Actually, that's the greater Sydney Water strategy, which more or less touches on all those topics, so I invite you to download it from our web page, but this was the easy answer. With IoT, it speaks more about monitoring technology and how we can support this. Obviously, as you said, you may have read it on Sydney Morning Herald and the weekend that Sydney will run out of water if we continue to do as we currently do. So, obviously one thing is to produce more water with desalination plants, which is not really what the IoT space covers. We cover monitoring and understand better ways what are used and maybe misused. So, for example, we try to detect leakage. Quite a big portion of our water is currently flowing through leaks in pipes. So the more of those leaks we can detect, the less water gets misused. We want to roll out a digital metering fleet, which gives us and our customers better visibility about their usage. Currently, we monitor the water usage once a quarter, so this really doesn't allow us to give you insights about your consumption. For example, to tell you it would be useful to have a water tank or do you use more water than your neighbour? Stuff like this should be possible going on. On the recycled water side and here we are with the wastewater, we just recently commissioned a purified recycled water plant. So, in western Sydney, we've got a recycled water network and this network more or less we use our wastewater filtered to a very high standard and then provide it for watering gardens and also for careful about car washing, washing of clothes. With monitoring technology again, we put many more sensors in our wastewater network to understand better what's in there and then to allow our plants to better be prepared and react to whatever comes down the pipe. So there's a lot happening, but to cover everything, please have a read at this tragedy.
Patrick Viney: That's a great answer, Christoph. So, Sydney Water Strategy document, go and have a read this afternoon after our sessions here at Telstra, of course. So we have time for one more question too.
Audience: Hi, thank you very much. I bought my Woolworths rewards card.
Patrick Misciagna: I'll validate it in the back in a minute.
Audience: My question is whether I get extra points for listening to you this afternoon. No, it's a question about what's in your mind about all of the security issues about using your point-of-sale things. You know, I flashed this past, you scan it, you had a little pilot thing where you were using cameras six months ago maybe it was, I noticed, in some of your stores. I just wonder where all that information goes and also whether there's any commentary to make about connecting the dots between the Visa card I use and this and where it all goes and how you protect it.
Patrick Misciagna: Yeah. So I think we've been as clear as possible with that. We do not keep that data. So the data that we're using first when you're walking through the store, I think what you're asking is the AI data from the cameras, how to detect if you've scanned it properly and, sorry. Right. He said if he bought any nappies. But as you're walking through the store, we're not scanning everybody as you're walking through the store. It's when you get to the checkout, we blur your face and we make sure that you are properly scan. And then if you are properly scanned and linked to your receipt, we open the, this is the work that we're doing, open the electric gates and then that data, your image, even though it has been blurred, your face is deleted. And that's the idea. And the pilot now so things might change but we have no intent on holding that data unless, of course, it's criminal activity and then we send it directly to the police department for review. But we don't hold that data. And that's, again, all in pilot now. Who knows if that could benefit the customer by using that data? That would be something that would yet to be seen. But we're not looking to hold that data and use it for any nefarious reasons or marketing reasons even.
Patrick Viney: Thanks, Patrick. Look, I'm sure there's probably a lot more questions you might like to ask our guests. They will be around this afternoon, so if you do bump into them, feel free to have a bit of a chat. Look, this brings us to the end of this session, so please join me in thanking our guests, Dr. Christoph Prackwieser and Patrick Misciagna.
[Your Business Optimised. Telstra and Telstra Purple logo]
Online Event
Your Business Optimised Online was an hour focused on business and personal optimisation and resilience. Our distinguished panel delved into how AI, automation, and cyber security are driving new workplace experiences. Plus, our special guest and keynote speaker, Paul Taylor shared his story of how you can build resilience in high-pressure situations and optimise your performance. The event also provided highlights from keynotes, breakout sessions and offers while we were on the road.
Panelists:
- Kerrie-Anne Turner, Group Owner and Executive, Marketing & Commercial Steering
- Paul Nichols, Head of Workplace and Digital Transformation
- Mary Hodson, Head of Microsoft Practice
- Oliver Welch, Head of AWS Practice
Keynote:
Paul Taylor, Former British Royal Navy Aircrew Officer
Neuroscientist & Exercise Physiologist
Online Event
[VIDEO STARTS]
Optimising your business can be a tricky business. The path to success is full of speed bumps, hurdles to jump, mountains to climb. Whilst you look for low-hanging fruit, windows of opportunity, the ladder to success.
[Images of people using tech in different industries].
But at Telstra, we don’t use metaphors to tell you how to make your business thrive.
[Images of people using tech in different industries].
Instead, we give you experts who understand efficiency in business and technology. Simple really. Because we get you and your business. So connect with us. Secure your business and empower yourself and your team to succeed. No ladder required. Telstra, Your Business Optimised. Kerrie-Anne Turner, Group Owner and Executive, Marketing and Commercial Steering, Telstra Enterprise.
[VIDEO ENDS]
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Hello and welcome to 'Your Business Optimised' online. I'm Kerrie-Anne Turner, and I am excited to be with you today.
Now, as the name suggests, today is all about optimising your business. It's the culmination of a nationwide roadshow where we brought together the best partnerships to discuss how the AI and security landscapes are changing, how we work and optimise your business.
But what exactly do we mean by optimisation? It's a pretty broad statement. In its purest sense, optimisation is making the process of something as effective as possible. And for Jemena, one of the country's largest utility providers, optimisation was about building the foundations of smart electricity meters to transform how they took readings. They partnered with the Telstra Purple Experts to create IoT-powered metering solutions. From devices in the field to a single source of truth, Jemena has the connected device management, data visualization, and analytics together in one platform. Now, this enables near real-time readings, which quite frankly gives crews a lot of time to work on their incredibly critical tasks. It also takes customer service to the next level, all while maintaining worker safety in the field, which we know is critically important. Jemena invested a significant amount of time and resources to achieve their goals, but we know for some of you watching today, optimisation may simply be running your workplace more efficiently and effectively with simple AI enhancements.
For others, it could be about ensuring faster, more secure connectivity. But here's the problem: understanding the need to innovate and optimise and then making it all happen isn't always simple. Legacy systems, operational constraints, skills, availability, or just simply finding the capacity in a hectic business environment are just some of the challenges that you are facing. And that's why we're here today to show you the opportunities, the opportunity that technology is, in fact, unlocking and to help you create a path forward.
Here's what we learned during our time on the road with our customers, our channel partners, and our technology partners in Microsoft, AWS, and VMware. Group executive Telstra Enterprise David Burns, aka my boss, he spoke about the importance of environmental and social governance and the role optimisation plays in creating a more sustainable business.
[QUOTE APPEARS ON SCREEN]
[“All Telstra Enterprise mobile plans and mobile broadband plans are now certified carbon neutral under the governtment’s Climate Active program, at no extra cost to your business.”]
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: He highlighted Telstra's business goal to reduce our own emissions by at least 50% by 2030 and how we're helping our customers deliver and report on their own ESG strategies. Now, according to a Deloitte report on enabling positive climate action, Telstra enabled customers to avoid 2.7 million tonnes of CO2 in 2021. Now, just to put that in perspective, that's the equivalent of taking 820,000 cars off Australian roads. It's pretty big and it really shows the power of what can be achieved when we all align towards a common goal.
[IMAGE OF TWO VISY TRUCKS APPEAR ON SCREEN]
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: For example, a few years ago, packaging solutions provider Visy partnered with Telstra to migrate its on-premise information storage infrastructure to a cloud environment. Now a couple of years later, they asked us to optimise their cloud infrastructure. This required Telstra to integrate multiple cloud computing and storage environments across Azure, AWS, and Telstra into a single network architecture. Now over time, both cloud transformations did improve the performance of Visy's applications and reduced its data centre-related emissions and energy usage by up to a whopping 80%.
Now, transformation of this scale really isn't possible without the support of our incredible partners, and that's what we did at our roadshow. We brought together Microsoft and AWS and explored optimisation in two very different ways.
[Image: ‘Digital debt is costing innovation’ from Microsoft Work Trend Index, May 2023]
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Microsoft delivered us the world of possibilities when it comes to AI and automation. Did you know that for all the hours we spend in PowerPoint, scrutinizing Excel spreadsheets or typing Word documents, just 43% of that time spent in the office suite is actually on creative problem-solving? 43%. So, there's an immense opportunity to improve how we spend our time at work, and having something called a copilot taking care of those tedious tasks will allow us to really jump through into our full potential. We'll hear more from our panel shortly on what copilot really is and how it can benefit your business.
Now, successful innovation and optimisation do need a solid foundation. Now with ransomware twice as likely as a natural disaster to impact your data and security, AWS showed us how security and data recovery practices really do underpin optimisation. You'll hear more about how security enables optimisation in just a moment.
Now, I don't want to give away too much, but in the next hour, we're going to bring you the best of our roadshow. Firstly, our panel of experts will discuss what optimisation means when we talk about AI, automation, ESG, and security. And we're going to have an incredible special guest, former British Royal Navy aircrew officer, nutritionist, and high-performance coach Paul Taylor is going to share his story of how you can build resilience in high-pressure situations and optimise your own performance. So stay tuned for that one.
Now, before we get started and to get a little bit inspired, I would really like to share a short video about how we helped an incredible Australian production team producing a feature film called 'Blueback' Stay connected and optimise their work between filming out in remote Western Australian locations and the editing studio.
[VIDEO PLAYS]
[TITLE: Supporting remote film production. Telstra’s Mobile Broadband Solution.]
TARA BILSTON: There's no way that we would be able to film out here in Burma without the connectivity that we have because it just would be so slow. Communication would be too slow. The film just wouldn't work.
[James Grandison, Producer. Video of camera on a cliff with ocean behind. Images of people editing video.]
JAMES GRANDISON: The remote technology system that's been put in place by Telstra has been a huge help to this production because we've got some unique challenges around the location we're in being quite remote and a somewhat limited communications base. Having the remote technology in place means that our various departments and various bases for where we do our operations all within a very sort of patchy environment for communications. The remote technology has brought all that together and meant that we could communicate effectively between departments.
[Christopher Reig, Digital Imaging Technician]
CHRISTOPHER REIG: Where Telstra has helped us has been to connect our sets, connect our locations, connect everything that we are working on, so that way we're not in dark spots throughout our work day.
[Lien See Leong, Costumer Designer]
LIEN SEE LEONG: We are trying to become sustainable and eco-friendly. You still need to be able to download the documents that you need, whether it's a call sheet or for us in particular, costume or the costume breakdowns. In order for us to continue to try and save the environment, we need to have that technology behind us.
[Robert Patterson, Executive Producer]
ROBERT PATTERSON: Telstra has enabled us to meet the sustainable screen's sort of ethos of the production through the fact that we use a paperless production methodology. So all call sheets, excerpts of the script, and lots of other documents, maps, other things are all issued electronically. So the fact that we all have great reception, great data, we can access those materials either from our accommodation or while we're traveling to and from locations or on location simply by looking at our phones or other devices. We're probably as remote as we could ever be in any location. And the fact that it's been a seamless experience really shows that this can work. This model actually works.
[Image: Netgear Orbi]
[VIDEO ENDS]
[TITLE APPEARS ON SCREEN: Penel Session, Optimise transformation and smarter partnerships. Paul Nicholls, Head of Workplace and Digital Transformation, Telstra Purple. Mary Hodson, Head of Microsoft Practice, Telstra Purple. Oliver Welch, Head of AWS Practice, Telstra Purple]
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: I just love that Blueback story, and I cannot wait to see that film come out. And it looks just so beautiful, too, so keep an eye out for it.
Now, during the road show, we spoke about the convergence of technology, innovation, workplace experience, and business optimisation. Across every event when we were presenting and when we were speaking to our customers, a couple of consistent themes emerged from our sessions. We're seeing three big opportunities driving change.
The first is artificial intelligence and automation, particularly in the workplace setting. Workplace behaviors have really shifted dramatically over the last couple of years, and let's face it, skills and talent are at a premium, and having the right systems and processes in place to support your human capital has really never been more critical.
The second opportunity is security. It must be front of mind. And as we embrace the potential of AI and automation, we need to set the right foundation to enable this innovation in a safe and secure way. Robust user-centric security backed by disaster recovery policies really does inspire confidence and maintains business continuity in the face of ever-rising threats.
Now, finally, the third opportunity we see is in ESG, Environmental, Social, and Governance. We all know Australian businesses are committed to reducing their impact on the environment. As David Burns mentioned while we were on the road, we're supporting our customers through technology by providing the technical skills to consolidate and automate environmental monitoring and reporting.
Today, we'll dig into these a little bit more. And to do just that, I am joined by three of Telstra's smartest minds: Paul Nicholls, Head of Workplace and Digital Transformation at Telstra Purple; Mary Hodson, Head of Microsoft Practice at Telstra Purple; Oliver Welch, Head of our AWS practice at Telstra Purple. Now, welcome, everyone. I'm thrilled to have you on the panel and feeling a little bit intimidated. These are some of our smartest minds.
Now if you have any questions, please pop them into the live Q&A, and we will do our best to answer them. And if we don't get to them in time, we will certainly follow up.
So, to get us started, brains trust, I'd like to talk a little bit about automation and AI and its impact on workplace experience. Look, it's a hot topic at the moment and one that was barely even in the public consciousness like six to nine months ago. It's just such a nascent technology at this stage, but its potential is truly immense.
But how do we navigate our way to this vast ocean of opportunity? Recently, a few weeks ago, many of us were with our customers at the Gartner IT Symposium, and it was all that anyone was thinking about.
But before we begin, I am going to do a little bit of audience engagement, and we're going to gauge the temperature in the room. Now, you'll see a pop-up on the sidebar of your browser. We're going to do a little bit of a poll. The question is, is your business actively exploring AI and automation to improve operations? So please go ahead and answer that, and we'll come back to you in a moment. But Mary, I'm going to head to you first because this is such an exciting topic. As I mentioned earlier, Microsoft Research found out that a whopping 57% of the time spent in the O365 platform was spent managing information and communication that doesn't actually matter.
How do we automate news artificial intelligence to really get that time back?
MARY HODSON: Yeah, it's amazing when you see those stats. And I think we spend so much time in meetings and managing those information flow, it can be really challenging to have time for innovation and strategic thinking. The promise of AI is essentially to really lift the burden of some of those administrative and repetitive tasks. And as Satya from Microsoft says, the new generations of AI will remove the drudgery of work and really unleash creativity. And I'm really excited to see about where that can take us.
Now, Microsoft last week just released their general release date for Copilot in November, and so it's really exciting to see how we can start to see Copilots pop up in some of our office applications.
[Image appears showing ‘Artificial Intelligence as a Copilot for work’]
So if you think about some of the examples that that will bring, it could be summarizing meeting actions at the end of a meeting. It could be helping us draft email responses, creating or summarizing lengthy Word documents, and also really easily generating charts and PowerPoint presentations with ease. So we can spend more time actually sharing that information and capturing the insights and actually pulling all of that info together.
And in addition to that, for a more flexible approach, they also have Azure OpenAI. And so we've actually used this internally within Telstra with our Ask Telstra app. This is something we've enabled for our frontline teams within Telstra and our Telstra stores and it gives them the information about Telstra products and services so that they can service our customers more effectively. So, it's amazing to see the application. In our roadshow session as well, we also showcase the art of the possible with creativity in using Azure OpenAI and so be sure to see those sessions if you haven't already seen them. Really, the possibilities are limited by our imagination, and it's really got the potential to increase productivity, also giving time back to people's day, and who doesn't want time back in their day, Katie?
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Oh, absolutely Mary. What's really interesting when you talked about a moment ago about the drudgery, getting rid of the drudgery and unleashing the creativity, honestly, I'm sold, but I am a little more sold on Ask Telstra and how we're using AI ourselves. And I know we'll talk a bit about that a little bit later on.
So, Paul, I'm going to pop across to you. This is amazing, but I really want to see the rubber hit the road here. I'd love some examples of how we're helping customers and how this is playing out with our customers.
PAUL NICHOLLS: Yeah, I'd love to, Katie. Look, I'm genuinely excited about the Copilot-type AI utilities that are becoming broadly accessible to us. A great example is GitHub, which our software developers are using. So, Copilot for GitHub to allow software developers actually to be much more effective and spend more time on those creative problem-solving situations with customers rather than the administrative tasks. Some of their research around how GitHub copilot uses a benefit is 96% of those users said they are faster at doing repetitive tasks. 88% said they felt more productive in that environment.
I think the other thing is, you know, we are going to see those copilot-type tools and utilities really help us cross-train people like we've never been able to do in the past. Take an industry like utilities, for instance, where we're seeing the prevalence of advanced IoT sensors, data analytics fundamentally change how companies are operating. Sydney Water, for example, who provide water recycling wastewater across 5 million residents in Sydney and the Illawarra region and manage about 50,000km worth of pipeline. They've, over the past six years, been deploying up to 26,000 IoT sensors across their network and that's to allow them to fundamentally transform how they operate, moving from a situation where they're relying on residents and councils to call and say, "I've got a bit of a smelly out the front of the house or there's a burst water main." So moving from that to actually those IoT sensors and data being able to use predictive analytics and that data to identify leaks and faults in the network. In the future, we'll see residential smart metering coupled with AI also shift then with the ability to provide advice to residents on how they can more efficiently use that precious water.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: I'm really interested in getting your team to help me with a bit of a copilot at home. Is that on the horizon yet or is that just not there yet? I'm actually going to think, I'm not going to think the same way walking along the pipeline, the water pipeline, that's not far from my house as we walk through the bush in the local area where I live. So I'm going to be thinking a little bit differently about how technology is used to manage that infrastructure.
So, Ollie, I'm going to head over to you, and it's OK to call you Ollie. We've known each other for a little while. Everyone calls me Katie, by the way, so if you're wondering where that's coming from.
OLIVER WELCH: Well, in simple terms, there is lots of security considerations, and that's with all new technologies that we're deploying here. But one of the ones that really comes to mind when we're talking about data and AI is about data privacy and protection because we are going to be working with quite sensitive data and ensuring that we've got the controls in place to protect those assets that we have will be super, super critical.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: So, I just want to kind of double-click on that a little bit. The Gartner IT symposium, they referenced that 96% of their customers that were surveyed did not have what they called AI-ready data. So that's a little bit alarming and concerning. So I want to kind of dig in a little bit on that and get your thoughts on the relationship of data, security and AI.
OLIVER WELCH: Absolutely. And look, with all new technologies, it's all about starting with what is the business problem that we're trying to solve and data and AI is no different with that. And AWS and Telstra Purple have great methodologies to support us as organizations to do that, and it's called the Walking Backwards Approach. And Paul, remind me the design-led thinking that we do through the digital squads over there. And what that does, it enables us to identify that business problem before we go and investigate and start looking at all of the different data sources that we might need. So once that business problem has been identified, that's when we can start to classify what type of data we will need access to as part of it then we can put the controls around it to ensure that it's safe and we're delivering the outcomes for our customers.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Thanks, Ollie. That was really interesting. I like the concept of human-centred design and almost working backwards, which was super exciting.
[Image of poll appears answering ‘Is your business actively exploring A.I and automation to improve operations?’]
So we're going to actually jump to the poll now and have a quick look. And I'm taking a look at the poll and actually, my live data is not feeding in at the moment to my poll, so I'm going to come back to that in a moment, but I am very keen to understand how you're actually, whether you guys are data ready or AI ready and is part of your strategy. OK, I've got it coming through. Actually 54%, yes, we're exploring it as a business. Amazing. So, you're all thinking about it. It's really interesting.
So, OK, we're going to jump onto topic number two and it's a nice segue there into security. And I really want to talk about security because it's all good and well to leap into the potential of better work experiences and optimisation. However, whilst we should encourage innovation through data, AI and automation, we really do need to assess the risks. So, I do want to do another quick poll. So, I'd love your insights on this. In Australia, how often does a data breach occur? So, I'd love you to answer that, and we'll come back after this panel set of questions and see if you got it right.
So, Oliver, I'm going to stick with you, and I'm just going to talk about a quick couple of questions.
Now, we did talk about the implications of security. I'm really keen to understand how AWS actually and practically enabling us to build securely when it comes to transforming our enterprises.
OLIVER WELCH: So the AWS platform is secure by design. However, along with the platform, there's 300 plus security tools that organizations can leverage to improve their security posture. However, with choice comes complexity, so it's super important to understand how we apply these controls to the appropriate applications and data set.
[Image appears on screen shwoing AWS and Telstra logos. ‘Working together to help make Australia the most cyber secure nation in the world by 2030’]
Now, AWS have a framework, it's called the Well-Architected Framework Review, and this is super critical for supporting organizations with remaining compliant. It's made up of six pillars of architecture best practice of which security is one of those.
Now, when do you use it? I think that's a good question, too, is it's not something that you'll deploy and run that framework once because we know workloads change over time and adapt. So we recommend that they're built into the design phase right at the beginning, they're used when we're delivering out the tests and dev environments and also into production. And finally, every six months we should be running this to make sure that we're maintaining compliance. So, if you're out there and you haven't done a Well-Architected Framework Review or a WAFR, please reach out to your AWS and Telstra Purple Team. We'll be here to support you.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: I love that. I love us really getting into the mindset that security is truly intrinsic, and it's not a once-and-done approach. So absolutely reach out if you are thinking about really ensuring you have best practice security.
So, Mary, I'm going to pop into you now and have a quick question.
It's not just about security; there is a lot to focus on with security, but we also know that Microsoft acknowledged that we need people to do this, and we are potentially facing into a significant skills gap, and that cliff is fast approaching. In fact, we heard that by 2030, that we're going to need 1.2 million more people in tech-related jobs, which is a big number. So, what are Telstra Purple and Microsoft doing to tackle this challenge?
MARY HODSON: Yeah, thanks, Katie. And those numbers are staggering. I think probably where we need to start thinking is that not everyone follows the same technical pathway into the technology industry as many of us have in our careers. And in fact, some of the most inspirational tech evangelists that I know actually started their careers very, very differently. A great example of that is with our own founder of the power factory within Telstra, and this is our low code power platform application that was actually started by one of our field workers. And he had an idea about generating applications that would help the field workers in the field do their jobs more effectively by having the information they needed at their fingertips. He went to a building app in a day program which was run by one of our partners and set about developing his own low-code app that is now turned into a platform that is used across all of Telstra whereby people can submit requests for new applications. It's governed and managed accordingly as well. And so, Nathan did a fantastic job but didn't have a technical coding background. And so it's just amazing how the technology has evolved to really enable people from all sorts of career pathways to join the tech industry.
Now some of the work that we're doing in Telstra Purple with the Telstra Purple Academy, we've partnered with Yirigaa, which is an Indigenous organization, and they provide opportunities for Indigenous people and people with diverse backgrounds to come into the technology industry by providing training and mentoring opportunities for them. Microsoft are also really passionate in this space, and so they're doing some work with the University of Technology in Sydney to develop new graduate certificates in business applications. So, giving people from different courses and backgrounds the stepping stones to get into the technology industry. And within Telstra, we've also recognized that digital literacy is something that we all need to face into. It's no longer just a technology issue; it's an issue for everyone, and so we have programs such as the Microsoft Enterprise Skills Initiative, and we also have a data and AI Academy that we're kicking off. And so this will give our people the skills they need to leverage the technology, really understand how to use it to make more informed decisions. But with the technology changing so rapidly, it's something that I think we all need to make sure that we're keeping forefront and finding ways to leverage that in our day-to-day.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Oh, I love it. And I love Nathan's story. You know, this is how we get incredible talent to enter the tech space. And I think, Mary, when you and I started in tech, it probably wasn't super cool, but it is so cool now. So looking forward to 2030.
Hey, Paul, I'm going to jump back to you. And you're obviously working very closely with our customers to help safeguard them as they embark or execute or even finish their digital transformation journey. I'd love to hear some incredible examples of some of that work that you're doing with our customers.
PAUL NICHOLLS: Well, KT, with the kind of rapid adoption of technology and those technologies being increasingly integrated through distributed supply chains, etcetera, the cyber security landscape is continually shifting. Take the IT and OT ecosystem. So OT being the operational technologies that control and monitor things like pumps, conveyor belts, fridges, etcetera, those networks used to be segregated, but now because we actually want to pull the data from both sets of systems, we're seeing convergence across them. So think of the Sydney water example where we've just added 26,000 additional connected devices into an ecosystem that increases the threat landscape that Sydney Water are having to deal with.
Take the retail sector, for instance, where over the last 2000 years, innovation has looked like moving from the abacus to a cash register to an electronic cash register. Over the last five years or so, we've seen massive shifts forward in transformation in that space with integrated digital supply chains, smart gates, video analytics, and connected fridges all requiring connectivity, and then a strategy around how you manage and govern the data that's used across them to run your business.
Woolworths, for instance, has chosen to kind of keep segregation between the IT and OT networks, but they have to do and they're doing that to help with their security posture. But they need to be able to take that data across systems and so spend a lot of time thinking about policy, governance, and how we manage the data across both. And so many businesses, including our own, are really looking to turning our attention to how do we get that next level of policy, governance, and controls around that data ecosystem.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: It's definitely a complex landscape ahead of us, but I am so excited to have Team Purple and AWS and Microsoft working with our customers along the way. Makes it super exciting.
Alright. We're going to jump back to the poll and I'm going to have a quick look in Australia, how often does a data breach occur?
[Image of poll appears showing ‘In Australia, how often does a data breach occur?’]
I wonder how many of you got that right? A good portion of you got that right, eight seconds. Every eight minutes, I should say, in Australia, there is a security breach, 76,000 reported breaches to the Australian Signals Directorate. So, that just tells you how big a challenge the security landscape is.
Now, the third opportunity we're seeing is environmental, social, and governance. Last year we published a report by Deloitte Access Economics, which identified that businesses and customers adopting technology like cloud computing, IoT, telematics, and smart agriculture could reduce their operations emissions by up to seven times. With this in mind, I'd really like to take our discussion with the panel to focus on some real-world examples.
Now, I've got another poll for you, and I'd love you to participate in that. Does environmental, social, and governance form part of your organization's IT strategy? We'd love to hear.
Now, while the team are watching us at home or in their offices or on the moon because we are all working flexibly these days, the third topic, Mary, I'm going to come straight to you. I'm really, really interested to see an example of how, you know, stepping into the workplace and driving workplace experiences is delivering for optimisation and sustainability strategies.
MARY HODSON: Yeah, well, I think over the last few years, obviously we've seen such a move towards collaboration applications that enable people to work from anywhere. We're really fortunate at Telstra; we've been able to do that for a really long time, but I think we've seen that reduction in non-essential travel as a result, but also support for people to work from outside capital cities, which wasn't really a thing that was done much before. When we look at also the trends around migration to cloud, it can be really difficult for organizations to maintain on-premise data centers with heating and, sorry, cooling and power in a net zero way. And so that's where both Microsoft and Telstra have really strong commitments in this space.
When we look at our commitments to go net zero, which was a number of years ago for Telstra, we've also put in commitments by 2025 to have all of our power actually delivered by renewable energy. So at the moment, we leverage a lot of carbon offsets so the power purchase agreements that we have in place will enable us to get there by 2025, which is pretty amazing. And then there's further commitments by 2030 to further reduce those emissions and Microsoft had made commitments to go actually negative by 2030. So with that, it just enables our customers to be able to leverage technologies in such a way that enables them to offset their emissions. But we're also starting to see within Telstra Purple customers asking us on how do we help to capture the data around how we're using technology internally. And so there's a lot of technologies that we can use such as sustainability manager which we've deployed in Telstra that help our customers to track their emissions. And so there's a lot of things that we can do to really help our customers navigate the complexity around ESG.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: I think we sometimes forget that the cloud is metaphorical, right? It does require heating and, sorry, cooling and power, I should say. We don't want to heat a data center, do we, Paul? That would that would be dramatically bad. So, you know, we forget about that and we forget that that's where we can truly add value relative to our bottom line. So, that is incredibly exciting so thank you for sharing that.
So, Ollie, I'm going to pop back to you. Now, we know that a secure environment is critical to enabling solutions like cloud optimisation to work. I'm really keen to hear about some of the recent successes that you and your team have delivered for our customers.
OLIVER WELCH: Yeah, perfect. No worries, KT. So look, we talked about a lot of examples where we've got frameworks that really support us with adopting technology, whether it's the Well-Architected Framework Review, the working backwards or the human-centred design kind of aspect.
In every business or every problem needs to have a business case before you go to solve it. So, this particular customer we've worked with and we work with all their key stakeholders to go, right, here is a current state legacy data centre that you're in and they wanted to explore the future and where should they be going with that. So as part of that business case, we were able to identify that the AWS platform was going to deliver them the outcomes that they were looking to deliver out of that business case.
The second step that we go through on our process is a discovery of that existing environment. What that discovery does is enable us to identify that current state and the future state and what are the gaps and the processes that we need to address to be able to get you to that place. Now because we had already identified with the business the direction that we needed to go, we could fast forward into the adoption of leveraging the secure AWS cloud platform to stand it up in days and weeks instead of weeks and months. So I think if there's anything to take away from it is with adopting any of the new technologies, security has to be brought into that discussion and let's build that in right up at the front. Let's assess, you know, build out that business case, assess where you are and then let's accelerate that adoption of the technology.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: I loved the fact you talked about security and human-centred design as one. If you hadn't enabled that human-centred design and you said something, and I'm not quoting you verbatim here but you talked about the fact that is the technology going to enable the business outcome. That doing that at the beginning of the process but not only doing that at the beginning of the process to get an incredible outcome for our customers, you actually had an ability to react when something had occurred and there was already a challenge in the system.
So I loved you sharing that story and I can't wait to hear more of those stories from our customers.
Paul, I'm going to throw to you. Now Telstra purple is the glue that works with our partners and of course our customers to bring together digital transformation for our customers and helping them embrace the technology that we've described today. In the discovery and assessment stages of many of the projects that you do, I'm fairly keen to hear some of the common themes that come out from customers during that process.
PAUL NICHOLLS: Yeah look, I think Mary touched nicely on kind of the environmental dimensions of ESG. If we think about how generative AI plays into ESG as a framework, it certainly comes into the social and governance aspect. So around social, we're concerned with how to protect and respect data and privacy for both our employees and customers, how we ensure and develop responsible supply chains, how do we improve and implement our ways of working and what that means to our people. And then on the governance side, you know, a lot of the conversations around how we adopt AI in a way that effectively aligns with risk management frameworks ideally updates them because they're not fit for purpose as they would be today. How it impacts ethical business practices, regulatory compliance, etcetera and so the conversation with many of our customers is around how do we effectively and responsibly leverage AI? That's probably how do I start doing it quickly and effectively and how do I do this in a safe and sensible manner, including how I keep my stakeholders, board executives across what's doing, how we managing risk, etcetera around that overall environment.
And so at Telstra we believe that we must be actively experimenting with AI and across the business and so that's a very different shift for, you know, what we've probably thought of in the past. So active experimentation across AI in the business but we've done that by providing a framework to do so as well inside Telstra. To help our customers, we've created an AI adoption service which actually looks at many of those dimensions and this service is based on our own experience and that of our technology partners who we have spoken about today and I'd say those experiences are kind of iterating every single day at such a fast-moving environment. And a little bit like Ali spoke to taking a human-centred design approach to adoption means that you're not just looking at the technology aspects but you're considering employee experience, customer experience and how that all flows through into governance policy etcetera, to ensure you're ready to operate more effectively.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: I love it. And Mary, I'm going to leave the final word to you in 30 seconds or less. This isn't just, you know, futuristic. I'd love you to just share and wrap up and let our audience know how are we using and developing our responsible strategies to AI but managing that with experimentation as well but doing that responsibly.
MARY HODSON: Sure KT. Well, within Telstra we've recently enabled Bing Enterprise and Azure OpenAI which is a sandbox environment that we can use for many different use cases in addition to the Telstra knowledge base. And I think when we look at how we're adopting that internally, there's kind of three things that our data and AI team have called to action for all of our leaders in the business and the first one is to really make it personal. So start to incorporate this into your day-to-day work and start to leverage the technology. The second is to look for opportunities and make it your business to look for opportunities within your teams on how you can start to look for process improvements generating use cases with AI and the third part is around strategy. So make sure that you're building this into your strategy so that you've got a plan to incorporate AI. And so that's how we're incorporating that within Telstra.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Well, thank you, Mary. I loved you sharing that and thank you to all of our panelists. Incredibly wise advice in an emerging and evolving technology space. I don't know about you but I'm so impressed with this panel and the brain trust has just blown me away today. Now we've given you a taste of the opportunities we're seeing and how organisations are optimising their operations and we know that every organisation is its own stage of the journey but one thing is clear, no matter the industry or location, there's a lot of opportunity to transform your operations and optimise your business. If you want to learn more about what we've covered today, please visit our content gallery. A link will be sent to you after this session.
Now we've run out of time for your questions but we will get in touch with them and answer you directly as well.
[VIDEO STARTS]
[‘Your Business Optimised’. Telstra and Telstra Purple logos appear on the screen]
[VIDEO ENDS]
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Now speaking of optimising, I am really excited to hear from our next presenter. We've been talking about optimising in a business sense but optimising is also about preparing yourself to perform in pressure situations and make the most of the mental and physical tools that you have at your disposal. Now, let me introduce you to our keynote speaker, Paul Taylor, a former British Royal Navy aircrew officer. Paul is an exercise physiologist, nutritionist, and neuroscientist who is currently developing resilience strategies with the Australian Defence Science Technology Group and the University of Newcastle. Paul has a proven track record in leadership management and dealing in high-pressure situations through his former roles as an airborne anti-submarine warfare officer and a helicopter search and rescue crew member with the Royal Navy Fleet Air arm and has undergone rigorous combat survival and resistance to interrogation training. I reckon we could all do with the resistance interrogation training sometimes. Today, Paul will explore the human stress response and how developing stress fitness equips you to adapt and respond to the challenges life throws at you.
Please welcome Paul.
[‘Build resilience and optimise your future self’, ‘Paul Taylor’]
[‘Paul Taylor’, ‘Exercise Physiologist, Nutritionist and Neuroscientist’]
PAUL TAYLOR: Thanks, KT. So I'm here to talk about stress fitness, and I got very interested in stress when I went through combat survival and resistance to interrogation training in the military, but now I've turned into a bit of a geek. So I'm currently doing a PhD in psychology, focusing on stress fitness, and so I'm going to talk, I've got 25 minutes, so I'm going to get straight into it.
[IMAGE: ‘Stress-fit’ points to four images. ‘Shift the thermostat, know thyself, optimise your brain, eat a low hi diet’]
I'm going to talk about four different things. The first thing I want to talk about is know thyself.
[IMAGE 1: person with tape measure around waist]
[IMAGE 2: person with head in their arms sitting on floor]
[IMAGE 3: image of hand surrounded by pills]
[IMAGE 4: ‘addition’ highlighted]
So I'm going to start with the problem statement. We are currently the most overweight, most depressed, most medicated, and most addicted cohort of adults that there's ever been yet life has never been so good.
We have it easier than all of our ancestors yet we are going through what we can only describe as a twin physical and mental health crisis, and a lot of it is to do with stress.
And recent research has really revealed the impact that chronic stress has on our brain and throughout our body and how it contributes to all of these chronic diseases.
[Image: image showing how stress impacts physiology]
And so a quick introduction to your stress response system, you'll see it on the screen here. On the top left, you'll see that when your brain is stressed, it activates your sympathetic nervous system. That's the very fast-acting nervous system, and it and it kicks off or it triggers the release of adrenaline and noradrenaline from your adrenal glands, but then if that stressor is prolonged or severe, something called your HPA axis activates, and that results in the release of cortisol.
Now, the godfather of stress is a guy called Hans Selye and he thought that with chronic stress what happened is we reduced our ability to produce cortisol and that's when we got stress-related illness. We now know that's not the case. We keep pumping out cortisol, and that's when it has a really damaging effect on us.
[IMAGE 1: image showing impact of stress on the brain]
[IMAGE 2: screenshots of four articles showing impact of stress on the brain]
So the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio was first to show in his lab that when you become stressed, it's all about a part of the brain called the amygdala. So it's responsible for processing strong emotions, and when it senses a threat or stress, it can actually secrete chemicals out that shut down your frontal lobes, that thinking, planning judgment part of the brain, and he called this amygdala hijack. Basically, your amygdala says to your frontal lobes, talk to the hand. I'm in control of this brain, and this is when we lose it.
But what happens with chronic stress over time and especially workplace stress, the research has shown that it drives structural and functional changes in the brain. And how we know this is by putting people in brain scanners, imaging their brain and then following them up for a period of months or years. Ask them about the amount of stress, particularly workplace stress, and then seeing what changes in the brain. And what we actually see now is the amygdala hypertrophies, it grows bigger. Just as if you were to train your biceps lots, they grow bigger. The same happens with your amygdala. This means that your brain develops a negativity bias, so you start to subconsciously scan the environment for stress and threat, and you linger on it, and at the same time, your frontal lobes shrink. That thinking, planning judgment part of the brain shrinks because stress kills off neurons in the frontal lobes, and they are the same brain changes that we see with anxiety and depression. And this is the very strong link between stress, anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders.
[IMAGE: diagram shows the milk, moderate, strong, and chronic impacts of stress on the brain]
What we now know that happens in the brain is that it's all about the intensity and the duration of stress. So we know that mild stress is actually good for us, and anybody who's ever had a job that was really boring will know that performance wasn't good. We need stimulation, arousal, a bit of stress to get us interested, and we actually now know that moderate stress is good for your brain because it helps to drive learning and synaptic plasticity, the ability of your brain to adapt and get better. But it's when that stress becomes strong and particularly strong and chronic that it starts to kill off neurons in the brain and stops the development of new neurons, which is clearly not what we want.
[IMAGE: four charts show impact of stress over time]
Here this is recent research that basically shows if you look in the top left, that's a normal adaptive response to challenges and intermittent stresses where our cortisol levels wax and wane and it starts to become problematic. If you look down in the bottom left is when we have this chronic stress and over time we release more and more cortisol, we get into a state of hypercortisolemia, and we know then that with chronic stress over years, if you look in the top right here what happens is eventually your adrenal glands become overworked and they wave the white flag, and you then have an inability to produce cortisol, and that's not good because it means you have no energy, you can't get up, and this is the same that we see with people with trauma over years. Clearly, we don't want that unregulated long-term stress.
[Image: two screenshots showing academic articles. ‘Resting-state heart rate variability after stressful events as a measure of stress tolerance among elite performers’ and ‘Common features in overtrained athletes and individuals with professional burnout: implications for sports medical practice’]
So I think we need to look at elite performers to be able to glean some tips from them. So I'm going to talk about elite athletes. It's a pretty landmark paper that showed the very strong connections between athlete overtraining syndrome and corporate burnout, and you can see here, this was a number of years ago.
[IMAGE: ‘common symptoms of overthinking and burnout’]
There are a huge amount of similarities in both populations. Their working capacity, performance impairs, they get tired, they get irritable, they have sleep disturbances and sickness, they have cardiovascular changes. We now know the bottom two, that's the same as well.
We know from recent research that our hormonal changes and activation of inflammation. So it is almost identical, and we need to learn the lessons of elite athletes.
[IMAGE: model of athlete training. ‘Increasing intensity, duration and frequency of training]
If you look here, this is a model of athlete training and way on the left, this is undertraining. They're not doing enough; they're not getting enough stimulation. Then they go into acute overload, and then the optimal form of training is what we call overreaching. This is where the athlete gets loaded up in volume and intensity for a short period of time, and it can burst them through a plateau and improve their performance. But if they get that wrong or they don't have enough recovery, they go into overtraining syndrome, and that's the same analogy for us.
And if we think about it, athletes train most of their time and perform a little bit, but we are performing most of our time in business and training very little. And most of the improvements in the world of athlete training and performance in the last decade have not been through training methods; it's recovery.
[IMAGE: diagram of vagus nerve]
So it's really key that we're recovering effectively, and this is where I want to introduce you to your vagus nerve. The 10th cranial nerve is called the wandering nerve, and it connects the brain to all of your visceral organs, and it is responsible for recovery.
That sympathetic nervous system, it's like a seesaw. The opposite is the parasympathetic, the rest and digest, and we can actually measure it. It's to do with the tone of your vagus nerve; we call this vagal tone. You have high vagal tone; it means you are recovered. Low vagal tone, you're not recovered.
[IMAGE: screenshot of article: ‘Resting-state heart rate variability after stressful events as a measure of stress tolerance among elite performers’]
So let's look at some of the really recent research from Special Forces soldiers. So these are people going for selection, for officer, the hardest course in the world, and what they found is that they tracked these guys.
[IMAGE: diagram showing autonomic nervous system pre-event, intra-event, and post-event]
They looked at their autonomic nervous system, and they found that the elite of the elite, the people who pass selection at baseline, they had higher parasympathetic activation, they had higher vagal tone. They had suppressed sympathetic activation, but as soon as they knew that a stressor was inbound, that switched very, very quickly. Their sympathetic activation got turned on super quick and it stayed high during the stressor, but as soon as the stressor was gone, boom, it flipped over, and they went straight into recovery. Anxious people get activated very quickly, but it stays elevated even after the stressor is gone.
[IMAGE: diagram showing stress fitness, ‘low stress fitness’, ‘moderate stress fitness’, and ‘high stress fitness’]
So this then leads into my definition of stress fitness which I'm doing for my PhD, and I've defined this with my PhD supervisor, Eugene Edman. It's the malleable ability, which means changeable or trainable, to engage, maintain, and extinguish the stress response and then to flexibly adapt to physical and mental challenges and/or advantages to enhance tolerance and/or performance.
So you'll note there's a psychological component and there's a physiological component, and it's not about resilience. It's not about bouncing back; this is resilience 2.0. Will you become better because of exposure to that stress? And it's like, I'll use this continuum because everybody gets the physical fitness continuum. You can be low fitness, moderate, or high, but you have to work to get there, and it's just like this. You've got to work if you want to have high-stress fitness, and you stop doing the work; your capacity to handle stress is going to get eroded. So let me talk about some things that we can actually do to optimise our brain and our stress fitness.
[IMAGE: diagram of vagus nerve]
So again, this is about the vagus nerve, and it now shows that we can train the vagus nerve. We can actually modulate it, and one of the best ways of measuring this is heart rate variability.
[IMAGE: chart showing heart rate variability]
Most people think, say, I have a resting heart rate of 60 beats a minute. Most people think that it's metronomic, it's one beat a second. What we now know is that that's the case just acutely like today; it means that I'm not recovered from a really hard workout or a stressful day yesterday. We know that if my heart rate variability is low, if it's metronomic over the period of a couple of weeks, that I'm getting stress overloaded, and then if it's low for months, it's one of the best predictors of an impending heart attack.
[IMAGE: screenshots of articles relating to physiological adaptations]
And so all the executives I work with, I get them to measure their heart rate variability. So let's talk about training it.
[IMAGE: screenshot of article ‘The Effects of High-Intensity Interval Training vs Moderate-Intensity Continuous Training on Heart Rate Variability in Physically Inactive Adults’]
One of the most important things that you can do is high-intensity interval training. This improves heart rate variability in everybody, but the great news is if you're not that active, it has an even bigger impact on your heart rate variability, and the reason why exercise is so powerful is that it controls our gene expression.
[IMAGE: screenshot of article ‘Exercise Controls Gene Expression’]
Every time you exercise, there are three waves of positive gene expression, and the first and most important is the activation of stress response genes.
[IMAGE: diagram showing three types of genes released across time]
These are magical little proteins called heat shock proteins that get released in response to the stress, and they get inside your cells and they actually fix damage. But then they trigger another wave of gene expression called your metabolic priority genes that make your entire ecosystem of cells function better in your body and your brain, therefore improving your health and performance.
And then we have a third wave, your mitochondrial enzyme genes, that's a bit of a mouthful.
Think of your mitochondria, they're like the batteries or the powerhouses of your cells but look at the timeline of changes here. It lasts for 24 hours.
[IMAGE: screenshots of four articles showing connection between brain performance and exercise]
So the big take home is if you have limited time to exercise, it's not about doing two one-hour sessions or three half-hour sessions, try to do a short burst of high-intensity interval training every day, and then you will get permanent improvements in your gene expression.
The other thing that's important about exercise is it has a huge positive impact on our mood, and all of the research shows that exercise is actually more powerful than antidepressants.
And the reason is that every time you're exercising, you release endorphins but you also release your monoamines. If you look in the bottom left, these are three neurotransmitters serotonin, which is important for mood and sleep. Noradrenaline, which is important for mood and focused attention, and then dopamine, which is important for goal-directed behavior and motivation.
So every time you're exercising, there's this neural symphony of neurotransmitters that are released that make your brain function better and enhance your mood and protect you against the damages of stress.
[IMAGE: chart showing connection between cortisol and time]
And the last thing I want to talk about with exercise is this study which basically compared people undergoing a stressful event. So this is Msrp test, it's 30 minutes of a stress battery, known psychological stressors that elicit a reliable cortisol response. And as you can see here, they compared fit active people versus unfit inactive people and the fit people had much more reduced cortisol responses to psychological stress.
[IMAGE: screenshot of article ‘Stress and the neuroendocrine system: the role of exercise as a stressor and modifier of stress’]
So what I want you to understand is that exercise is not just a stressor, it's a modifier of stress. The fitter you get, the more able you are to handle other types of stress like psychological stress. Every time you're exercising, what you're doing is you're activating this stress response system globally. You're training it to activate and then to turn off.
[IMAGE: screenshot of three articles and diagram showing box breath]
And another great way that we can use to turn it off is breathwork. And so there's lots of types of breathwork that work. Two of my favourite, box breathing used by US Special Forces soldiers when they're on patrol to control their arousal. Now, if you know anything about Special Forces guys you know they don't do fluffy stuff. They do stuff that has been demonstrated to give them a performance edge but for me, even better than that is resonant frequency breathing.
This is a breathing rate that connects your lungs to your heart and your brain and it reduces your blood pressure, reduces your heart rate and enhances your heart rate variability and that for most people is about six breaths a minute. So it's a ten-second breath cycle but the breath out has to be longer than the breath in. So ideally you breathe in for four seconds, you breathe out for six and actually do it through your nose because what you realize is that when you breathe in a big breath through your mouth, you activate the upper part of your thorax but when you take a big breath in through your nose, you activate this lower part, that diaphragmatic.
And most people don't realize there are neurons in your brain watching every single breath and when you chest breathe it activates the stress response.
And we know that people are stressed, they do more chest breathing. So that slow nasal breathing is really key.
[IMAGE: diagram showing zone 1 and zone 2 phycological adaptations]
Now, I just want to talk for a minute about psychological adaptations and I'm just going to give you a little taste because of time here.
[IMAGE: screenshot of article ‘Challenge or threat? Cardiovascular indexes of resilience and vulnerability to potential stress in humans’]
So there's a couple of things I want to talk about and one is the language that you use when you are presented with potential stressors. So we know that if something is announced, if you view that as a threat, say it's workplace change and you're thinking about all the bad stuff that might happen and whether you're going to have a job, that threat response activates cortisol whereas if you view the same stimulus as a challenge, it activates your fight or flight response which is more adaptive.
So the language that you use in your own head to your peers and especially to your kids when they're faced with potential stressors is absolutely critical.
And my time in the military, I don't think I heard the word stress once. I heard the word challenge a lot and sometimes a massive challenge that we have to lean into but that is the sort of language we need to use.
[IMAGE: blue circle ‘zone 1’ inside larger orange circle ‘zone 2’]
And then some great advice in this area came from the stoic philosopher Epictetus who about 2000 years ago said that everything in your life is in two zones, Zone one and two.
And according to Epictetus Zone one is the stuff that is within your will or within your power or as we would say, within your control.
And if zone two is everything else and Epictetus said that zone one is to do with our belief systems what we choose to be afraid of but particularly the thoughts that we choose to linger on our behaviours, our actions, and especially how we choose to react to our circumstances.
Everything else is zone two, what people think about you, what they say about you, the past and the future. And if we think about mental health, we've talked a lot about this and depression is a lamenting on the past. Anxiety is a strong concern about the future but in both cases we bring the past or the future into the present tense and that's when it creates difficulties.
[IMAGE: blue circle ‘zone 1’ inside larger orange circle ‘zone 2’]
Epictetus said you have no business in the past, in the future, all you have is a series of present moments and he said that when you're faced with challenges, you must focus on that which you can control: zone one and refuse to invest your energy in what you can't control.
So practically, when you've got things that are stressing you out or worrying you, it's right up here. Get a page and put a line down the middle right zone one on the left and zone two on the right, and make sure you're focusing your energy on the stuff that you can control.
[IMAGE: ‘Shift the thermostat’, image of sauna and shower]
Now let's talk about some more physiological stuff we can do, and this is about shifting the thermostat.
[IMAGE: screenshot of article ‘The effect of cold showering on health and work: a randomized controlled trial’]
So this is about cold showers, which generally gets a bit of a groan when I talk to people about this, but I read this research paper about seven years ago, and it convinced me to have a cold shower at the end of my normal shower every day for the rest of my life, and I haven't missed one yet. Basically, they took a bunch of people from a workplace and randomly assigned them into two groups. Group A who did their normal shower, group B who they asked to turn it to cold at the end for a minimum of 30 seconds. They measured their health, their sickness, and their absenteeism and followed them for a year, and at the end of the year, the people who had the regular cold showers had a 29% reduction in sickness and absenteeism. Now, that is pretty bloody impressive.
So, I need to introduce you to my little dude.
[IMAGE: person in shower with shocked facial expression]
This is Oscar, and he looks like this for a couple of reasons. Number one, we were just back from Bali. He doesn't normally have that in his hair, but secondly, he has this expression on his face because he's about three seconds into a freezing cold shower in the middle of winter in the Mornington Peninsula in southern Victoria when it does get cold for all the Queenslanders and Sydneysiders. Now, before anybody phones child protection services on me, the reason that he was in that cold shower is that I read the research paper, and I got into the shower that day, and I thought to myself, I've got to do this right. This is pretty compelling, and I'm standing in the shower, and I'm just about to turn it to cold, and I said, 30 seconds. And just as I'm about to turn it to cold, this little voice came in my head and went, Hold on a minute, it's winter. This is your first cold shower; you don't have to do 30 seconds; just do 15. And I'm rather embarrassed to admit publicly that I gave in to my little weak inner voice, and I thought, right, 15 seconds, and I turned it to cold just as Oscar happened to walk into the bathroom. So he walked into the bathroom. I let out a squeal, and he's kind of looking at me going, what are you doing dad? And I'm like, I'm having a cold shower, buddy, and he said, Okay, what are you doing that for? And I couldn't really think of anything at the time; I just went because it makes you tough.
[IMAGE: person in shower with shocked facial expression]
He went, Oh, really? And I got to the end of my 15 seconds, and he said to me, how long did you do, dad? And I said, I did 15 seconds, and he said, get out, I'm going to kick your ass. So I got out, and Oscar got in, and I said, right mate, turn it to cold. And I waited; I had my phone timing myself. I waited for about three seconds, and then the cold water hit, and I took this photo. So this is Oscar three seconds in, and this is Oscar 30 seconds in. Check out that focus, and he just kicked into box breathing which I had taught him for competing in karate but didn't think to use. Then he got to 30 seconds, and I said right mate, you're done. And he stopped the shower and he walked out like this and he went, loser. So we started this little competition which has culminated in ice baths, but that's not the point; here is the point.
[IMAGE: diagram showing benefits of cold and heat exposure]
If you look at the bottom here, here are all the things that happen, and there's at least 40 research papers on this slide. You get huge improvements in metabolic health whenever you regularly expose yourself to cold water. You get improvements in mood, you get more mitochondria in your muscles, in your fat, your antioxidant defense system improves, but it turns out if you turn the thermostat the other way and you do regular saunas, you get lots of similar benefits, and the key component that is present in heat exposure, cold exposure, and exercise are stress response proteins. So this is about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable through vigorous exercise, cold exposure, heat exposure; that is what trains your stress response system.
[IMAGE: ‘eat a low hi diet’, image of brain with knife and fork]
For the last few minutes, I'm going to talk about nutrition because that's really important. And look, there's lots of diet wars out there, and my view on this is anybody who tells you that there is one diet that we should all be eating is either demented or they're trying to sell you something or they're a member of a cult; it's one of those three things. We now know different people have different genes, and the optimal diet for different people is different. However, there's one rule that I have created that crosses all of those different diets, and it's the low HI diet, and HI stands for human interference. Here's how it works. If you're looking at a piece of food deciding whether or not you should eat it, just look at it and think if you can see that it has been alive recently, it is either grown out of the ground, off a bush, come off a tree, run around on four legs, or swam recently and is minimally interfered with by humans, eat it. It's fine; don't worry about the bloody fat, carbohydrate, protein; that's the worst thing we ever did. However, if you're looking at a piece of food and you're going Mr. Krispy Kreme donut, I don't remember seeing you running around on four legs, then it's in your treat food.
[IMAGE: 80 and 20 divided in a circle]
So this goes with the 80 over 20 rule, and most people get that. Roughly 80% of stuff that goes in your mouth on a daily basis should have been alive recently, minimally interfered with; the other 20% is your treat food, and enjoy your treat food. If it's chocolate, if it's ice cream, buy the best damn quality that you can afford, right?
[IMAGE: diagram of NOVA classification of foods]
Now this is linked to what we call the Nova classification of foods that came out of a university in Brazil, and it classifies foods as raw and minimally processed, that's my lower HI. Then you have processed culinary ingredients that you cook with, and then they have processed foods, things like canned fish, canned vegetables, artisan breads, yogurt, cheese; that's okay. It's the ultra-processed foods and drinks, and most people get most of them sausage rolls, pies, and chocolate ice cream, but there's things like breakfast cereals and supermarket brands that are in them, and it turns out that this stuff is really damaging for us.
[IMAGE: four screenshots of academic articles relating to processed foods]
And the worst five countries in the world for consumption are the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; in all of those five countries, more than 50% of all calories consumed are ultra-processed foods, and it's killing us and it's killing our kids. What we now know when they compare you look at the two studies on the bottom, when they compare countries that eat about 20% like Spain, France, and Italy, when you get to 30%, you increase your risk of every form of cancer and every form of cardiovascular disease by more than 10%. And you increase your risk of depression, and what most people don't understand is that when you're stressed, your body robs your brain of nutrients to create stress hormones. That's when you need a high nutrient density diet, and we're eating crap lots of the time.
[IMAGE: four screenshots of academic articles relating to processed foods]
And the paper in the top right shows that people who have 50% or more calories from ultra-processed foods have a whopping 62% increased risk of all-cause mortality.
[IMAGE: emoji of frowning face]
So this is about eating real food, and I need to sum up with the bad news because I'm a realist and I have to give you the bad news. And the bad news is that no one is coming ever, seriously, no one is coming to sort you out. No one is coming to move you up that stress fitness continuum. This is all about you and the choices that you make every day. So hopefully, I've given you some knowledge and a few different choices that you can use straight away. Thank you. So if you're interested, that's my podcast, that's my book, that's my website. Thank you.
[VIDEO: ‘Your Business Optimised’. Image of Telstra and Purple logos]
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Thank you so much, Paul. I tell you what, I'm very impressed with Oscar's stress fitness, and you've taken us through so many incredible tips to help raise ours. Now, you've given our audience a lot to think about but that does bring us to the end of today's broadcast. It's been informative, inspiring last hour and I hope that you've taken away some very practical steps to help optimise your business but optimise yourself as well.
We've learned that robots are not here to take our jobs, but they can be a co-pilot to help us take back our time and put our valuable energy into important tasks. We've learnt the immense possibilities afforded to us by AI and automation, but it must be underpinned by solid security and disaster recovery. And we've learnt that far from being a cost to the business, ESG can be a chance to drive value to the bottom line.
If you'd like to view any session recording from the roadshow, remember to visit our content gallery and that will be sent to you after today's session. If you're ready to take the next step, our Telstra Purple, Microsoft and AWS Practice are offering exclusive discovery sessions to our attendees of the roadshow and this broadcast. Simply click the request callback button on the right and let us know how we can help you on your journey.
Thank you so much for joining us today and we'll see you again soon.
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Microsoft: Will AI Fix Work?
Vanessa Sorenson, Global Partner Solutions Director for ANZ, Microsoft
AI is everywhere, it is the force multiplier that will enable Australia to meet the economic growth the future demands. The intensity of work and always-on communications are outpacing our ability to keep up and AI is poised to create a whole new way of working. Join Microsoft as they shed light on the impact of AI copilots as tools to support productivity and share insights from their 2023 Work Trends Index and the three urgent insights business leaders must know now as they look to quickly and responsibly adopt AI.
Microsoft: Will AI Fix Work?
[Title: Vanessa Sorenson, Global Partner Solutions, Director for ANZ, Microsoft]
Kia ora. G’day,
How are you all doing straight after the lunchtime session? I love that one. It is fabulous to be here in person, and thank you, Kathryn. I've got 10 minutes to talk to you about a topic that is unbelievable. Did you know that it was only March when this AI revolution started, and more than a hundred million users came on? So welcome, everybody. So, so, so wonderful. And yes, I've been given 10 minutes to talk about all three things AI, but it's going to take longer than that. So I encourage each and every one of you to go out to the breakout session.
You know, I knew we were onto something pretty great when my 82-year-old father came for dinner. He said, Vanessa, what's with this AI thing? What's going on? Like, I'm using it every day to build out documents. What's going to happen with healthcare? What's going to happen with education? And, you know, when someone at 82 and your 14-year-old son are just as excited about it, that's what I want each and every one of you to leave today.
It's like being in the barrel of a surf, you know, a wave, and you're right in the middle of it. And you feel this energy, this buzz, but you don't really know how it's going to end. But what I want to say, it's not often in your career that you get to be right in the middle of the wave. It was only at breakfast this morning, and I'm really going to show my age that I remember Beyond 2000, that TV program that was pretty out there and now we're living in it. Each and every one of you needs to think of the art of the possible within your business.
So will AI fix work? Gosh, hasn't the last few years changed what we thought work was? These tools and opportunities for each and every one of you is going to help you. This work index that we've actually gone out there and found out, and none of you will be surprised that how bogged down we are, how overloaded we are, and how much we simply can't keep up with the amount of change. You know, I'm one of those parents that says, my son and daughter, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" They’re like, "I don't know. I don't even think the job I'm going to be in is not even existing years." And that's the truth. But we also have to think of creativity.
I joined Microsoft because of Satya Nadella six years ago. I joined this movement, and Satya Nadella is the leader that said we are no longer going to be a know-it-all culture. We're going to be a learn-it-all culture. And he also knows that it's critical that we maximize every single day to make sure that every day we get the most out of it.
That is why we are investing so heavily in all things AI. AI has been around for years. It's now that we have the compute power, the Azure platform, the brains of our platform with our partner Telstra to take this to the next level. But let's be honest, there's a big promise out there, and a lot of people are saying, will AI fix all of this for us? Well, I believe it definitely lifts the burden on the work we do.
Like Kathryn said, we need to be working on critical work. And actually, the recent study, which 31,000 people were part of over 31 countries with all of our trillions of 0365 data said that they are not creative and are so bogged down by everything that's coming at us, we have to lift that burden. It is the drudgery of things that none of us actually get our energy from.
And you know what? I don't know about you, but it's separating us from the soul of work, the purpose of what we all want to achieve. You know, I know every day when I get out of bed, I want my days to maximize. And I can tell you that this report said that 57% of our time is managing information and communication that actually doesn't really matter.
And you know, I'm on the beta version of this AI thing, and I can't predict the future, but I can certainly see that this is going to uplift more than we could even imagine. So hopefully, I'm sure all of your boards and all of your exec teams are saying, what does this mean?
Well, in this beta, I got invited to a meeting. Yes, on Teams, that platform that we didn't think would ever take off, go code. And we recorded the meeting like many of us do, and we were having a great session, and don't we all? We like the sound of our own voice. As soon as the meeting finished, tell me all the actions. What do we need to do by when? And the best news. I wasn't even at that meeting. Tell me when my boss raised his voice or when he mentioned my name. Summarize all of that and then set up our next meetings.
This is about unleashing that creativity because we have got a barrage of Teams meetings coming. But isn't it amazing when we actually get together? So the small snippets that I've been seeing are just next level, and who here doesn't want a co-pilot just the sound of that somebody that's right beside you because this is now managing our lives. You know, it's the work, but it's also the stuff with our kids. It's all the sporting things and everything that we've got to do, the travel that we're all now doing. And that's what the promise is.
But many also say, what about the bad actors? What about the things that we need to be careful of?
Well, I say that if you're going to leave your front door unlocked, someone may come in. So talking to Telstra about how secure is your environment because your data now is the new gold, and once you can put that securely, imagine your business with your data of everything that you know about your customers, about how this can change and transform them.
So I don't know about you, but I was certainly feeling overwhelmed when I saw this coming. A lot of people said Vanessa, surely within Microsoft you all knew that you were investing like this. We didn't. But many of you say, look, Microsoft, we missed the search movement. We missed the developer movement, we missed the mobile movement. We're not missing this movement, and we will do it the most trusted and secure way. And some of the products and services that you're going to see through this incredible partnership that we have with Telstra means that you can build out these services in the most secure way.
I'm watching it save people's lives, literally. That technical debt that you have because you couldn't invest in it. You can now leapfrog whether it's a single patient record of getting information to our frontline workers or the work that we're doing with an organization like Volpara to make sure that we're saving women's lives through breast screening and AI to make sure that the things that the human eye can't see this technology can pick up.
But I encourage all of you to think about skilling. We will need, the survey said, about 1.2 million Australians and digital services skillsets to truly embrace this. So one of the programs that I launched in New Zealand was 10K Women to inspire more women to consider a role in tech and also more diverse backgrounds of our indigenous communities. I encourage you to do that because it is coming.
And for any people when you're employing and say, "I'm not digital, I'm not a geek or a coder," I say no, we want the creative thinkers, we want the problem solvers, we want the people that truly don't have to do that stuff that's going to be simple, to imagine a world ahead.
So we have launched many, many opportunities, which I encourage you to look at, certainly in partnership with Telstra. I'm so excited what we can do together, and I know that we are right in the middle of this change. It isn't often in your life when you can look back and go, wow.
So I encourage you all to ride the wave. Don't sit back and let the future go past. Be part of creating that with your teams. Embrace it and have an amazing wild ride.
Kia ora. Thank you, team.
[Your Business Optimised. Telstra and Telstra Purple logo]
AWS + Telstra: Securing the Critical Infrastructure of Australia
Phil Rodrigues, Head of Security, APJ Commercial, Amazon Web Services
Telstra and AWS help all Australians stay safe online. That includes everything from advising the Australian government how to make technology engineering as robust as physical engineering, to helping small businesses keep their data safe, to helping protect individuals from online scams and fraud. Learn more about these efforts, and learn about the role you can play in making Australia the most cyber-resilient country in the world.
AWS + Telstra: Securing the Critical Infrastructure of Australia
[Title: Phil Rodrigues, Head of Security, APJ Commercial, Amazon Web Services.]
Good afternoon, everybody.
My name is Phil Rodriguez, and I'm the Head of Security for AWS, Amazon Web Services in Asia Pacific and Japan for our commercial organisation. Myself and my team work every single day with our customers big and small, helping them understand how to stay safe in the cloud.
And I was really happy to hear Kathryn and the other speakers and the panelists talk about security and people consistently through the other conversations today.
In 2023, data is more important than ever for the entire Australian economy. And we see that organisations big and small are wanting to focus more and more on security. The governments, large organisations, small organisations, and individuals realise that as they're using computing, that they're using communications and that they’re using cloud, that security is fundamentally important to all of these.
That's why I want to talk today about how we can work together to make sure that the government realises their vision about making Australia the most cyber secure nation in the world by 2030.
And if there's one thing that I want you to remember from what I'm saying today, it's this. Cybersecurity is not scary. Cybersecurity is not complex. Cybersecurity is not even really about technology. Cybersecurity is about people.
The way that you can tell this is by looking at the focus of attackers through the years. It used to be that attackers back in the old days would focus on technology or math. Think about any hacking scene that you've ever seen in a movie where they're cracking encryption or bypassing some sort of advanced defenses.
Well, in reality, attackers are often looking for the easiest targets. What’s easier deploying advanced software in order to crack your really complex password or just finding your username and your password lying around and a list of a billion of them that are old. What's easier bypassing the math in your two-factor token or just calling you up and pretending to be from support. Attackers focus on people.
I also know this because although all of my customers get access to the same great advanced security technology, not all of my customers are equally secure. But organisations that want to be secure can. They need to focus on their people and they know they need to make their people the strongest link in the chain.
That's why we are talking about making sure that people have the skills that they need. That's what we're talking about, making sure that operations teams get the times that they need in the change windows they need to patch their applications.
That's why we're talking about making sure that application developers have the advanced technology they need in order to build the secure applications that are the foundations of the economy.
So we want to focus on people. And that's at the core of our approach with the Australian Government. That's why we're talking to them about things like demilitarising the language that we use around cybersecurity to make it less sensationalist and much more accessible.
That's why we're talking about how to keep things simple at a fundamental level in technology by doing things like focusing on identity and making sure that applications know who you are when you're accessing them and making sure that you know that those applications are keeping your sensitive data secure.
And that's also why we're focusing so much on skills. A theme that you've heard through the rest of the presentations as well.
For example, AWS has trained over 300,000 Australians in cloud and cloud security, and we've got a global goal to train 29 million people around the world.
One of the ways that we do this is through a program called AWS Restart, which is where we take underemployed or unemployed people or people between jobs and give them access to free training programs to give them skills in clouds and cloud security.
One way we do this is by partnering with the Australian, with the Victorian Digital Jobs Initiative to embed AWS Restart into their training programs.
So Telstra and AWS work closely together with many iconic truly Australian businesses. And I just want to name two of these quickly. One of those that Telstra works with is the Royal Flying Doctor Service, where they've deployed the Secure Edge Network in order to provide secure connectivity between the data centres and cloud locations. The solution allows them to identify the people, the data, to apply meaningful policies in order to secure the people no matter where they're located.
One iconic business at AWS works quite closely with is Swimming Australia. We worked with them quite closely to stand up a data lake that holds the performance information of all of the swimmers so that the coaches can use advanced AI ML technology in order to squeeze the maximum possible performance in what's a highly competitive and truly iconic Australian sport.
So how are some ways that you can leverage this? Well, one example is through Telstra's cyber tabletop exercise. This is a low-stress way for your people to experience real-world cyber scenarios in the comfort of a tabletop exercise. This allows you to practice your computer security incident response process and tools before you actually have to experience an incident.
One example from AWS is our continuing focus on making sure that application developers are able to create secure code. Amazon Code Whisperer is our AI-powered coding companion that operates directly in the developer's environment. It's been trained on billions of lines of code and it helps to immediately spot when insecure code is written at its source code and gives an AI companion suggestions immediately for the right way to build that secure application.
In Australia, 98% of businesses are considered small and medium, and 94% of those have a turnover of less than $2 million a year. Those small and medium businesses are asking us more and more how they can also stay safe online. Some good examples of that are Telstra's cloud security assessment. This is where people from Telstra will sit down with businesses of all sizes, conduct a detailed assessment of their environment and then sit down with them again face to face to walk through the details of the report.
At AWS, we love to use big data to help small customers. We have millions of users who use our services every single month around the world, and for example, our identity service processes 1 billion transactions per second of identity information from our users. This gives us a very large footprint into how people normally use cloud services, which allows us to spot patterns when malicious users are trying to abuse those services. We feed those patterns into services like Amazon Guard Duty, which is our Intelligence Threat Detection Service, so that it can monitor AWS accounts and infrastructure and create alerts that help people identify the source of this activity.
I want to call out something that Kathryn mentioned before, which was great. Telstra also helps to protect individuals. Their partnership with our joint customer, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, to create the Telstra scam indicator helps CBA identify as their customers are calling them. If the mobile phone that they say they're calling from is actually the one they're using to contact them back and to conduct other checks, this helps to protect those banking customers, including people I'm sure in this room, from malicious people trying to transfer large amounts of money out of your account. So this is a great initiative from Telstra helping individual people.
So what can you do to help? How can we work together to help protect large businesses and individuals? First of all, I want to encourage everybody to keep using trusted providers. For example, Telstra spends billions of dollars to improve the communications infrastructure in Australia. And AWS has spent billions of dollars to improve the cloud infrastructure in Australia. Since 2012, AWS has spent $9 billion in Australia. In the next five years, we have plans to spend another $13 billion to enhance the cloud infrastructure throughout the country. When you're working with Telstra and AWS, you're working with trusted partners that are making the foundations of your compute, your communication, and your cloud secure.
What can you do as individuals? Well, it still always comes back to protecting your username and your password. And the best way to do that is through two-step verification or multi-factor authentication. In 2023, this is very easy in your Telstra account. Just enable two-step verification or in your AWS account, use your multifactor technology of choice inside of identity and access management.
So I want to leave you with three practical steps. Number one, look at the AWS Well-Architected framework. This is our free public guidance for how to create good, sound, secure, cost-effective, and performant applications inside of the cloud. And it focuses not just on the technology but also on the people part to help your people make sure that they're making good decisions. Another way to start is by talking to Telstra about their Cloud Compliance offer. This is an intuitive dashboard that shows your security and compliance posture across multiple cloud environments and helps your people see what the priority is that they should be working on next.
Finally, join us back here in this room after the great next speaker and after the break to join people from Telstra, people from AWS, and people from VMware in our Optimizing Cloud Security session, which is right back here in this room. Thank you very much for your time. It's a pleasure working with Telstra so closely and bringing the global expertise of AWS combined with the local expertise from Telstra. Please remember that people are the essential component in cybersecurity, and let's all keep working together to make Australia the most cybersecure nation in the world.
Thank you.
[Your Business Optimised. Telstra and Telstra Purple logo]
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