- Hello and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm your host Aley Hammer
and today we're joined with Karen O'Driscoll,
the group executive for digital services over at Ventia.
Karen, welcome to the show.
Can you start by telling our audience
a little bit about Ventia?
- Sure. Thanks, Aley.
Ventia is one of the largest
essential service providers in Australia.
We've got a workforce of about 30,000 people
and over 100 clients
and we work across a number of industries,
including defense and social infrastructure,
transportation, infrastructure services,
and telecommunications.
I guess the best way to describe what Ventia does is
to think about your everyday life
and where you may come across Ventia.
If you're driving on a motorway
or in a tunnel and you have an accident
or you run out fuel, Ventia will come
and take you your car away and take you to safety.
The water and power that you use at home,
often Ventia is behind the scenes
maintaining and operating the plant and equipment
that provides that water and power.
When you visit
buildings in many locations across Australia,
Ventia are often managing those buildings,
the facilities, the leases,
the maintenance of those buildings.
So we manage a lot of federal and state government buildings
across Australia and New Zealand.
Given the increasing investment in infrastructure
across Australia and New Zealand,
the services we've provide and the talent that we have,
Ventia is positioned for a huge growth trajectory.
It's very exciting times for us.
- Well, Ventia has such a wide impact on people
and communities across Australia and New Zealand.
And Karen, is there a project
or achievement that you are specifically proud of,
where Cloud services really changed the experience
for all the communities that Ventia actually serves?
- Sure, Aley.
I mean, our Cloud based enterprise platforms
are a real advantage for Ventia
and there's many examples of the real value these provide.
I'll take you through a couple that I'm really proud of.
Our systems enable us to mobilize very quickly.
And this is really beneficial when they're
unexpected requirements or urgent requirements
from our clients.
A good example of this was standing up
quarantine services for Australians returning
from overseas at the beginning of the pandemic.
We were able to establish these services over a weekend.
We're also being able to expand our IOT services in health,
and that allowed Austin Health
to keep operating theatres running during COVID times
to ensure that the air quality was continually monitored.
Finally, during the floods in New South Wales,
we needed to expand our social housing call center to deal
with the thousands of urgent calls that were coming in.
We were able to cancel all of our corporate meetings
and move many of our employees to focus on this crisis.
And they were able to use our Cloud based solutions
to take calls and to inspect properties
and record information in the field.
We couldn't have done this without our standard
and Cloud based systems.
They were easily accessed by our employees
and immediately available for a wide range of people.
- Well, there were so many great examples there.
Thank you so much for sharing.
And Karen, when you began your career many years ago,
did you ever imagine that you would have a leadership role
in an organization like Ventia?
- Well, I've always enjoyed work,
and particularly industries with tangible outcomes
and services where you can really see the impact
of your work and that it has a positive impact on people
and communities.
And I always admired people leading digital strategies,
but I guess I didn't dare to dream
that I could have that privilege one day.
Initially when I studied computer science,
I couldn't even get my animated fish
to swim across the screen.
So my digital dreams nearly ended there.
Ventia was the perfect choice for me,
combining my digital drive and passion
in an inclusive culture to improve the lives of people
and all in Australia, you know, my backpacking heaven.
And it was clearly a winning combination for me.
As I've grown in my career at Ventia
and the organization's grown as well,
I've been able to develop my leadership skills
and I'm really pleased to have been supported
in a very authentic, to do so in a very authentic way.
I'm really proud to have the opportunity
to lead the digital agenda here.
It's such a large, diverse organization
and I really enjoy the fact that I can lead
with inclusivity and diversity front of mind.
- Absolutely, I mean, speaking of inclusion and diversity,
how do you build inclusion within your team
and ensure all the voices are heard?
Because, you know, a lot of organizations are
chattering a lot around inclusion and diversity,
but how do you actually implement it within your teams?
- Sure, some of the things we do,
so we have a very open structure, which is not hierarchical.
So there are no difficult sort of ranks
to navigate in terms of conversations or meetings.
The doors are always open
and that goes throughout the organization.
We like mixing up project teams
and giving people the opportunity
to contribute in a different area that may not be the area
that they commonly work in.
Also driving a digital ecosystem across the organization,
really allowing people to be part
of our data analytics academy
and our digital think tank.
Engaging people in that digital agenda
really brings some great thinking out
from people across the organization
that may not sit in digital, but really can contribute
and be part of that.
And their voice is really important and we want to hear it.
I'm also really passionate about neurodiversity inclusion.
We have a wonderful son on the autism spectrum,
and I guess with only 15% of working adults
in full time employment
this is something we're committed to changing.
Ventia works with a fantastic organization
called Australian Spatial Analytics.
And they've been amazing for us.
They deliver high quality analytics services
within neurodiverse workforce,
and with big data, I guess, driving a lot of what we do,
I truly believe that neurodiverse people will be
uniquely placed to interpret this complexity
at speed and with such a high degree of accuracy.
We are really excited to see the social benefits
and the business outcomes
that this extended inclusion can bring.
- Absolutely, it's really amazing
that Ventia is actually utilizing big data for this, too.
So Karen, to round up this interview,
are you able to share any future technologies
that you're excited about that will actually help
enhance your presence in the Cloud
and also your customer experience with NTO?
- Yeah, sure.
Whether it's, lots of technologies we're already trialing,
and we're working closely with technology partners
to demonstrate key benefits to our business
and to our clients.
And we're looking to productionize a number
of these pilots so we can deliver benefits
on scale across our large enterprise.
So 5G and edge computing,
this enables us to connect people quickly
and analyze large amounts of data on site.
This is really critical for us given the speed at which
we mobilize new projects,
but also the locations we may be in
and the amount of rich asset data that we process.
Robotics in our AI, they're already enabling us
to automate high volume processes
and to automatically make decisions
and recommendations based on algorithms
and continued learning.
We've got so much more planned in this area.
And finally, augmented reality and digital twins.
These enable us to visualize our client assets
and to run scenarios
to identify the best productive maintenance routines.
This is a real game changer
in improving asset management decisions,
extending the life of assets,
and reducing the cost of maintenance.
So some really exciting technologies coming to the fore
that we are certainly embracing and look forward
to delivering benefits from over the next 12, 24 months.
- Karen, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
The partnership between Ventia and Amazon is really amazing.
If anyone has any questions for Karen or about Ventia,
please pop them in the comment section below
and we'll get back to you.
Thank you so much.
- Thanks, Aley.