“My name is Conrad Mackenzie and I work for the New South Wales Business Chamber as the Chief Digital Officer.
“So if you slice it one way, I've spent about half my time working closely with government and half my time in private sector, industrial, if you slice it a different way, I’ve spent about half my time in consulting and half my time in executive roles.
“So as Business Chamber, we provide advocacy services on behalf of our members and we provide business services as well.
“So you would expect with a name like the New South Wales Business Chamber, we are focused on New South Wales, which is certainly where we've started but in the transformation, we've created a new brand called Business Australia and Business Australia is National because we really wanted to go hard on digital services and they know no borders.
“So right now we have got members joining Business Australia from right around the country.
“Like all membership organisations, we are at risk of losing members because it's so easy to resign. When they receive that email to renew its one click to the delete bin. So we needed to reinvent the membership model, remove the commercial impediment of signing up, reinforce the existing membership offerings we have and make it compellingly attractive to stick around.
“For a business our size, of about 700 people, we wanted to take advantage of the trends in the whole infrastructure industry and that is not own anything ourselves, not design it, not manage it.
“We wanted someone else to take all of that work from us so that we could concentrate on the more difficult challenges associated with the applications and bringing new services to market.
“We chose AC3 for a number of reasons. The top three of which would be firstly we wanted an Australian owned business. Being the New South Wales Business Chamber and Business Australia, in the business of supporting Australian businesses, it was important for us to go to somebody local.
“The second was they needed to have the skills. They needed to have the right skills. Very focused on the challenges we were facing in the infrastructure space.
“And the third was, I really wanted an organisation that had a culture that I could work with, that I could truly partner with.
“We implemented a lift and shift and then optimise strategy. So we did that by firstly putting in place governance sounds dry but essential and difficult to get right. And I then hired an outstanding project manager to work on our behalf inside my PMO with a small team.
“The mandate was to do this in six months or that was at least the stretch target and we did it in nine.
“The standout result for me is being able to very quickly set up working from home for all our staff. The pandemic caught us towards the tail end of the project and within a very short period of time we were able to set up working arrangements that really did satisfy people and they could take everything out of the office and work very productively from home. In fact, people think they've never been so productive.
“The second most important result for me is the reduction of P1 and P2 incidents and that continues on a downward trend. So the stability of the environment continues to improve and the third most important for me is the fact that I now have an evergreen technical environment where AC3 manage all of the components in that environment to a contemporary level and I do not need to worry about refreshing it.
“My experience with AC3 has been characterised really by two things that are very important to me. The first would be availability, whether the person is on the service desk or whether it's the CEO, I feel they are available as the need arises. And the second is about care.
“I feel that when I'm working with the team from AC3, it's a bit more than a transactional relationship. It needs to be commercial, but there is a sense of care that makes me feel this is more of a partnership than less.”