CIO Leadership Live Australia with Andrew Dome, Chief Digital Information Officer at Uniting

Cathy O'Sullivan  Hello.

Welcome to CIO Leadership Live Australia. I'm Cathy O'Sullivan, Editorial Director for Foundry in Australia and New Zealand. My guest today is Andrew Dome, who is Chief Digital Information Officer at Uniting. Welcome to the podcast, Andrew, appreciate you being with us today.   Andrew Dome 

Thanks, Cathy, it's great to be here, looking forward to it.   Cathy O'Sullivan  Great stuff.

And look, I always love to hear about CIOs origin stories. So can you tell us a bit about how you got your start in technology and what have been some of the highlights of your career so far?   Andrew Dome  Yeah, sure.

So my journey started 30 years ago in New Zealand. You can probably hear from the accent. I started working for Panasonic in New Zealand, and I was actually selling telecommunications equipment back then.

So, you know, PABs, systems, facsimiles, electronic whiteboards, and we were doing quite large organizational change and implementations into businesses in Wellington and beyond.

And then an opportunity came up in well, thinking about the overseas experience, or the big OE, as we called it back then, an opportunity came up to go to London and get involved into project and program management over there. So I took up a role over there.

I did about 10 to 12 years working for Lloyds Bank over there, in a project and then program management role. Really enjoyed my time there. Interesting times. I went through the GFC in 2007 so at that time, Lloyds ended up procuring HBOS.

So we went from a 70,000 seat organization to a 140,000 seat org. At that time I was rolling out an ITSM product called HP service manager seven, which was a precursor ready to ServiceNow. And they asked me to stay on.

So I ended up being there a little bit longer than I intended to be. But after my time in London, I ended up coming back to Australia and Sydney. Took up some operational roles.

I was the Head of IT Workplace at Stockland, moved over to Transgrid, cross over to utilities again, and was the was the CIO, acting CIO there for a couple of years, and then finally came over to Uniting.

So just coming up to to a year here, so really enjoyed my time at Uniting. And I'm sure we'll get into more detail around that.

I guess, just in terms of some of the highlights of my career, back in 2019 we won, my team won the Stockland award, or the Chairman's Award for Innovation that was around digitally transforming that workplace. So that's my background. Digitally transforming digitally transforming organizations and enterprises.

That was a great team award. And if you think about that timing, it was to transform that organization, make them mobile, enable them to work remotely, and come a year later when Covid hit in 2020, really set themselves up on that day one, just to move everyone home.

So yeah, really proud of the team that did that work there, and obviously got with the award for it, the recognition. And then at Uniting, over the last year, we've actually won a couple of technology awards around innovation.

We've got some augmented reality glasses which have been deployed out into aged care sector. We've got one award from the Aged Care industry IT Council, that was an excellence for innovation implementation.

And then more recently, we got an international award for the 12th Eldercare Awards for innovation, again, for that, for that same product. And then probably the real rewards or award for me is just seeing how I've kind of mentored some of my team over the years.

Just recently, I had an ops manager that used to work for me. I hired him in Stockland and took him to Transgrid, and I saw just recently that he was promoted, and he was actually acting CEO for Teachers Mutual Bank.

So great just seeing some excellent employees continue their pathway to some higher positions.   Cathy O'Sullivan 

Yeah, certainly very rewarding when people that worked with you and for you go on to great things. So look, you mentioned you're now Chief Digital Information Officer at Uniting. So tell us about the organization.

What is its mission and purpose, and how do you and your team support that?   Andrew Dome 

Yeah look, a really good question, and mission is a well, our mission here at Uniting is to disrupt entrenched disadvantage. We have core values for all - that's about being compassionate, respectful, imaginative and bold.

And I really like those last two, imaginative and bold, because our digital strategy really falls into what we're trying to achieve there to support those values. We have a very strong 10-year strategy.

So when I joined last year, we were two years into that strategy, and it has been reviewed and amended, and we are working towards that that date now, which is 2032. Part of that strategy is to increase our customer base from where we were.

So when I joined, it was 112,000 we now service 132,000 customers per year, but our goal is to service 200,000 by 2032 and what can we do as part of digital technology to support that increase? Well, first of all, the business needs to scale.

If the business is scaling, then IT needs to provide tools and processes to enable that business to scale accordingly. We need to attract and retain employees. We are in a very difficult market. All of the aged care providers are in that same market. The challenges around it.

We have a shortage of employees or candidates, so when we do attract them into our organization, we need to make sure that we can retain them as well. So we're looking at innovative ways to provide tools.

We have a term here called 'we want to hold the hand rather than the pen', and that's all about reducing the admin burden on there. And I've got some examples around that, which I can share later, around our AR glasses development, which we've implemented.

But it's really about reducing that admin burden. And what that does is it gives time back in our day for our staff to look after our aged care customers and clients.   Cathy O'Sullivan 

Now you've worked in a number of industries you mentioned earlier, working in banking in the UK, and you've also worked at Transgrid, but aged care is quite different.

So what have you noticed since moving into the CDIO role at Uniting, and how does it differ from the previous industries that you've worked in?   Andrew Dome  Yeah, significantly different.

We are a non for profit, but in saying that we do have a P& L, and we're responsible for the money that comes in and how we should spend that accordingly to look after our customers and our clients.

But the real key thing that I've noticed coming into this industry is it's such a collaborative nature around there. To give you an example, I'm part of an aged care CIO network called ACCION, and we really just see ourselves as peers and colleagues.

And if I go back to that last conversation around you know we are in difficult environment where there's not enough aged care providers, we have an aging population.

Therefore, the more that we can do to support our peers and colleagues in that same aged care industry is just going to help us all. So very collaborative.

There are doesn't really a day go by where a question is put out by a CIO in that network to ask about a particular platform that they're looking at, or a vendor that has done some remarkable work.

So we share a lot of industry stories there, and that's gold. It reduces that time around going to market and understanding that the players out there, the vendors out there.

So that's a really, really big difference there, in terms of the collaborative nature of our industry and the people that are in the same position as us. But then more importantly, what does it all mean?

Is at the end of the day, there is a human at the end of the chain.

So when we look at some of the digital technology coming through and the real advances that are being made here, there is a human at the end of the chain that is going to get the benefit of that.

And if I look at something like a digital twin or generative AI technology, you know, wearables for people in aged care. That sort of technology now is actually reducing, you know, trips and falls and hazards in an aged care environment.

So you're actually having a real impact by delivering this digital technology on a customer.

If you compare that to some of the other industries, like utilities, again, there is a great mission in that space, they're transitioning to renewable energy, financial services, slightly different again, but all of those things, if you put a digital twin into a utility sector, it will do things like manage vegetation.

Ultimately, it's about reducing operational costs, and that's increasing dividends to shareholders. So again, there is, there's positives around that.

But the real positive to me, moving into into the aged care sector is, you know, we're affecting humans and real people and customers at the end of the day, rather than returning high dividends to shareholders.   Cathy O'Sullivan 

Yeah certainly is an important mission, I'm sure, for the rest of the organization as well. So tell us about then you mentioned some of the wins that you and your team have had at Uniting, just talk us through some of those notable achievements in recent times.

  Andrew Dome 

So recently, over the last six months or so, we partnered up with TeamViewer and RealWear Viewer for some navigator glasses that use augmented reality platform. And what that does is it enables us to provide telehealth for our regional sites.

So we've got a number of sites across New South Wales and ACT, it's difficult to get our consultants, our practice specialists, to get out there for things like wound management. So creating this new platform means that we can provide one of these glasses on site.

We've got 23 of them at our aged care environmental sites now, and it means a registered nurse on site can dial in a specialist, and they can see what that registered nurse on site can see via a console, which is using TeamWear software.

And ultimately, it means that they can diagnose the symptoms faster. It means that we can deal with that condition around that wound a lot faster. We can stop hospitalization visits. And some of the stats that have come out of our proof of concept are amazing.

You know, we stopped nine hospitalization visits over the course of the pilot, which was six weeks. You know, we estimated we saved about $100,000 in operational costs. But it's not the it's not the monetary saving. I mean, that's, that's a plus on the side.

We are a non for profit. But the real benefit is it enables our customers to be seen faster. They're seen in hours and days rather than weeks, by trying to get a specialist out on site.

So look, that was a really great innovative way of looking at telehealth and when how we can do things better for our customers in those remote locations. So that's one example. We've implemented a generative AI platform called U-chat.

We partnered up with Microsoft in that space, and that's providing content retrieval for our policies and procedures.

So rather than our employees having to log on to the intranet and go and hunt down the 441 procedures that we actually have across our enterprise, they can just type in a question now, or, even better, use voice-to-text on their phone and get that content retrieved again in seconds, rather than 10 to 15 minutes, sitting down in a shared PC, finding the intranet, trying to find the content and retrieving it from that intranet platform.

So what does that mean again? It's giving time back to our employees. It's reducing a 15 minute, 20 minute activity down to down to minutes.

And if I can take a 20-minute activity and reduce it down to two minutes, then that's giving 18 minutes back in our day for our employees to actually deal with our customers and our clients. So that's a pretty exciting part of what we've done.

And then finally, just a couple of other things, we've introduced the first 100% indigenous IT company to Uniting. They are now running with our asset disposals.

We've never done that before, so I'm a really good proponent of that, and we want to do more on that, in that space. And then finally, just seeing the great partnership now with the business around some of the digital outcomes.

So the business have a very clear strategy as part of that overall 10 year corporate strategy, and just seeing the team partnering up, understanding the business outcomes, and then mapping that back to making sure our digital strategy can help realize those outcomes for the business.

So yeah, really notable outcomes and achievements, and very proud of the team for making it all happen.   Cathy O'Sullivan 

And you mentioned your use of Gen AI at Uniting. Are there any other emerging or future technologies that you think will have, you know, a huge impact on aged care in the next five years say?   Andrew Dome 

Yeah there's so much. It's it's exciting time, isn't it to be working in IT with the impact of generative AI. We are looking at a digital assistant, and the idea behind that is to remove the need to use a desktop or even a laptop.

We've got two sides to our business. We've got communities and we've got the aged care side, so we actually provide more services to the communities side of our business.

So if you think about mediation or counseling, mental health, early learning, there's some real opportunities there, again, to do a lot more via the phone, using technology like voice to text, using things like case notes.

So having our employees there or giving the our employees the ability to do voice to text, even in their native language.

So we've got a high percentage of Nepalese people that work for Uniting in aged care, so them being able to do in their native language, a case note which automatically go into our clinical systems. Again, it just reduces the time back.

It also means that the point of care, we're getting data back so our our employees can see those case notes at the point of care and offer a an uplift into into what they're providing to our customers and clients.

And tele health, that remote tele health, remote healthcare, again, there's some great opportunities there using not just the AR glasses, but having doctors dialing in and providing advice to our to our customers and clients.

And then sensors you know, sensors and IoT - looking at things like fall protection, using digital twins for doing training, so we can now look to train up our new starters that we are onboarding around how to provide service to our customers in aged care.

So, really, really exciting time, and I think we've worked in a time where there's been this exponential growth for the ability to offer such an uplift in our customer experience.   Cathy O'Sullivan 

So with so many stakeholders, then in the organisation -  and you mentioned, you know you have people who may not have English as a first language amongst your staff and indeed amongst the people you look after - so how do you ensure that adoption of new technologies when you are introducing them at Uniting?

  Andrew Dome 

Org change management is the key here.

If ...you can have the best platform in the world, you can have the best digital technology in the world, but unless you get your org change management right, it's not going to be adopted and it's not going to be picked up and run with by your employees.

So we are placing a large focus on that org change piece. It will fail without that being in place, and as part of that, and what we're trying to do is uplift the digital literacy of our employees.

So currently, we're running a number of sessions every week, and these are on our core, MLS, EMS products, Microsoft products. So things like OneDrive. You know, when do you use OneDrive as against sort of network shares? How do you use SharePoint Online?

How can we get the best out of the existing products that we use? So we are paying a lot of attention around that, we do realize that people out on the field at the coalface maybe haven't come through a really digital literate environment.

So we are paying a lot of attention to that in this space to just uplift that. So when this new technology does come on board, they're aware of it.

And of course, when we're introducing things like Gen AI, we're running dynamic videos now, we'll create dynamic videos so that they can, on demand, go and serve and see how things like our generative AI search engine will work. So org chains, absolutely is the key in the space.

  Cathy O'Sullivan 

And of course, another big challenge for any CIO, regardless of what industry you're in is cyber security. And we do know that health care is one of the sectors that, unfortunately, is targeted quite a lot by bad, bad actors.

So what are your biggest challenges when it comes to, you know, protecting client data and keeping your system safe and secure?   Andrew Dome 

Yeah, generative AI is, you know, it's got two sides to it, right? So it's absolutely providing some great benefits for our employees and therefore also our customers. But now you've got the bad actors are using AI to do smarter things.

You know, their phishing attempts and emails are becoming a lot better. They're writing in very, very good English, all of those red flags that used to come out because the grammar wasn't good, or the words weren't right.

Now AI is correcting that for you, so we've got to be on top of that. We need to move the goal post. We need to bring in additional tools and processes to make sure that we can be ahead of the game there. So we are.

We've got a very dedicated security team rolling out a security program, they are introducing tools to enable us to stop those bad actors.

We are tagging and classificating, or classifying all of our data so to make sure that it isn't exposed externally, and even in our use cases that we are for generative AI, we're making sure that that data is in our own data ecosystem, within the Uniting perimeter, we're not exposing any of that outside of there to any externals currently, until we've proven the use cases.

We've got the controls in place, we've got the security, the date of classification, to ensure and again, it's coming down to also to education. So we need to get better at that.

And in fact, our phishing campaigns that we use are getting harder, and we've got some metrics around the clickthrough rate for people, and even though they're slightly going up because those phishing campaigns are becoming a lot harder and a lot harder for people to detect they're thinking about things more.

So it's a combination really protecting our client data, ensuring it's housed within our own data ecosystem, ensuring that we're not exposing it to external sources, having those security controls in place, and again, education, education of our employees, because a lot of these attacks will always start with an employee clicking on a link which they shouldn't do.

  Cathy O'Sullivan 

Yeah, for sure that that link you shouldn't click is, is always the start of it. So Andrew, talk us through your approach to prioritization. Uniting is, you know, it's a not-for-profit.

So how do you prioritize what digital initiatives you are going to invest in when you are in a resource constrained environment?   Andrew Dome 

The first thing we do is we partner up with the business. And I talk about our digital strategy. Our digital strategy is really just an enabler for the corporate 10 year plan or strategy to be realized.

So we sit down at a directorate level, we speak to our senior services area and our community services and really understand their roadmap and their business problems that they're trying to solve over the next year.

We then marry that or or map our digital strategy to enable those outcomes to be realized.

We do a really, really good prioritization activity with them via workshops, hackathons and come down to what's the most important and prioritized items that they want, or outcomes they want to be delivered over the next year. So very collaborative in how we work with the directorates.

We also want to have a look at what's the biggest returns in terms of the employee and customer experience by delivering these FY25 outcomes.

So it's a combination, really, of understanding what is going to be the uplift in our employee experience, what's going to be a return in terms of time that we can spend with our customers, and what are the priorities for our senior directorates in terms of their outcomes that they want to achieve in 25 very collaborative.

It works really well, and we've got a really clear path of now what we want to deliver in FY25.   Cathy O'Sullivan 

So then you know, you mentioned earlier, some of the initiatives in terms of telehealth and that you really put that focus on lessening the admin burden of your staff.

But tell us a bit more about how you're using technology to enhance that user experience, that patient experience and patient engagement.   Andrew Dome 

Yeah, there's two sides to it. So we want to free up that time and remove that admin burden from our employees. And if we do that, that gives time back in a day for our customers and clients to be looked at, to be cared for.

There's seven and a half thousand employees of 10 and a half thousand employees, they work in aged care alone. So if you can times that the return in time, because we've taken away the admin burden, it's really looking after our customers and clients in a lot better way.

Then we have a look at the how technology can do that. So connectivity of devices. We've currently just gone out and spent a lot of time going back around to all of our sites, and the main problem that we were hearing was around Wi Fi connectivity.

Actually, Wi Fi connectivity wasn't the issue at all. It was actually just connecting the devices and the rooms for aged care customers. So that's what we did. We sorted those problems out.

And of course, that could be like one of the most important things for a customer in an aged care environment, being able to access their Netflix, to look at their movies, but also make sure that they can be connected to their to their family.

And then we've got some inflight projects as well, and it can be something as simple as a billing platform. We're currently looking at that. So going to a a more strategic platform.

Our customers just want, you know, one document where they're seeing all of their bills and all of the items itemized so they can see and they've got clarity around that. So we are looking at new tools to implement there.

So a real combination of existing platforms inflight to upgrade and again, those generative AI items which is going to improve the employee experience and therefore the customer experience.

And the last part of all that as well, we are looking specifically at IoT devices, wearables that our customers and clients can wear in those aged care environments.

So we can check, we can monitor, then we can see a problem, hopefully with digital twins in the future, we can call out issues before they are an issue, and actually stop a trip or a fall or a hazard taking place.

And that will absolutely provide a much better experience for our customers.   Cathy O'Sullivan 

So what role do partnerships with technology vendors or service providers play in your overall IT strategy, and what does a good partnership look like from your point of view?   Andrew Dome  Yeah, it's massive.

So making sure we partner up with the right technology vendors is huge. If I look at some of those two items I spoke of previously, so the Microsoft or the U-chat, that's Copilot.

So there's Microsoft's Copilot platform, which we use to return that content around our policies and procedures. We partner with Microsoft in Australia. They have a division called technology for social impact. We partnered up with them. We ran a proof of concept. They helped us with the build.

We implemented it, and look, that's been a really, really successful partnership, and now we're looking to expand on that. So we've got the policies and procedures embedded. We now want to expand it to a digital assistant to do so much more going forward.

In fact, we're meeting with Microsoft tomorrow to see how we can expand on what we've done, the foundational piece.

And then if I look at the the AR glasses, or augmented reality glasses, that was a really strong partnership with Team Viewer, and we presented that concept down at the digital health festival in 2024 a couple of months back.

And just out of that, we've had so many inquiries to us to say, what did you do? How did you partner up with them? And how can we get involved? Because we've got a use case very, very similar for that.

So I think a good partnership for me is one where both organizations are receiving the benefit. They see the value of it. If I look at TeamViewer, they want us to be successful around telehealth and these augmented reality glasses. So they're prepared to put skin in the game.

We noticed that when we went out to our first 23 sites, some sites were picking up on this better than others. So we reviewed that, and now we're partnering up team view to go back out do some additional or change around the use of these, these glasses.

So that's what I think is a successful partner partnership, where you've got vendors on the journey with you, prepared to have some skin in the in the game, and we've definitely seen that with both Microsoft and TeamViewer.   Cathy O'Sullivan 

And what do you think are some of the biggest challenges facing IT leaders in the aged care sector in the coming years?   Andrew Dome 

Yeah, look, I think data privacy and security is huge. You know, we talked about Gen AI before, and Gen AI does have major benefits for employees, for our customers, but we need to make sure that, you know, health records are secure.

The digital tools that we put in place is dealing with sensitive with PII information. So that's a challenge, and that's why we've got our security program now, looking at that as the bad actors are getting better at using Gen Ai. We have to respond to that as well.

So that's a that's an issue. The integration of systems is a challenge. So we've got clinical systems that are used across and they're different from what we use in senior services and communities.

So again, we need to ensure that these disparate systems, managing patient care, billing administration and so forth. They're really integrated and working together. So there's a bit of work that needs to be done in that space. Then there's the adoption.

We talked about that before you can have the best platform in the world and the best technology in the world, but unless you have the org change around that, communicate that and get your employees using it, they simply won't.

So that training, that continued uplift in digital literacy, which we're working on via webinars and so forth. That's going to be key around adoption, and then that will lead on to retention of our staff.

So when we do onboard a new person into aged care or communities area, we want to make sure that we retain them.

So providing them with these great tools, providing them with the org change and the training around it, that just means it's another reason for them to stay with Uniting. We've got a point of difference. We we make this a great place to work.

So some real challenges there, but we're dealing with those challenges, and I think we've got a really, really good plan for FY 25 just to improve this going forward overall.   Cathy O'Sullivan 

So in the nearer term, then Andrew, tell us what's important to you in the months ahead.   Andrew Dome 

So we really want to double down now in terms of the generative AI and the benefits and options available for that.

Like I said, we meet with Microsoft tomorrow to build on the Copilot that we currently are running to look at other use cases there, and again, provide a digital assistant via a phone, which will allow for things like voice to text and really reduce those admin burdens down.

We've got some very clear objectives for FY25 so you know, we've got that 10 year plan.

We're two years into it, the business has got some strategic objectives to meet, and our digital strategy, which is being rewritten to align to those strategies for the business areas, will enable that to happen. I want to ensure that my staff have very clear objectives on their role.

Why are we doing these things? So they should all have metrics around what we expect of them in the next year to be successful, because them being successful will mean we will deliver that digital strategy that will enable the business outcomes to be realized.

So again, lots of really exciting things in the in the months ahead, and looking forward to delivering it with my team.   Cathy O'Sullivan 

Andrew Dome, Chief Digital Information Officer at Uniting, thank you so much for joining us today.   Andrew Dome 

Thanks, Cathy, appreciate your time.