Interview with Chris Trigg

Head of IS and Business Transformation at Southern Cross Health Society

PwC: So we haven't specifically spoken about your digital strategy, if you had a list of priorities for the company as a whole, where does digital sit within that list?

Chris: It's one of our three core strategic themes. Modernising our core system is a key project we're working through at the moment. That's not about us being innovative at the core, innovation needs to happen nearer the customer. We are focused on finding those opportunities that will help us move faster and become more agile.

PwC: At the start you mentioned that your members, partners and employees were your key stakeholders, is there one of those that you’re prioritising with your digital efforts?

Chris: I think our members, definitely. Especially with new offerings like our mobile app. But it’s also about driving that experience and giving people a hassle-free, on-your-terms way of connecting with us. There are a lot of times when things will happen in people’s lives and they won’t want to use an app, they’ll want to talk it through with a human who cares about their outcome. So it’s about creating the right channels and offering a great member experience.

But we’re also not losing sight that we want to give our staff the right tools to work more effectively. The thing we hear back from our teams is they want the tools and technology to work better, but also they want to be upskilled in new areas like Agile.

Again, we’re playing catch-up, but the investment there is about giving people the tools to be more mobile and more agile. We’re also rethinking how we use collaboration technologies so we can connect people across the organisation and give them access to the apps and data that help them do their jobs, we need to make it happen in the easiest way possible. We’re also looking at more activity-based working methods to help support agility and collaboration within our offices.

PwC: Let’s talk about innovation. Do you have an internal innovation hub or lab? And where are you now with innovation?

Chris: So when I first started there were a lot of groups looking at things like continuous improvement and making small changes. But that didn’t have much intent or purpose and there wasn’t huge executive engagement.

When we set up our internal Horizons Hub, we had to make it cross-functional, so we went back to the leadership team and asked their teams to participate. We’ve got a project leader for that but every initiative has a team that draws on broad expertise from across the business.

As a result, there’s more of an appetite now in the digital space. So we’re looking around the business and finding who has the right skills and background to lead projects. We’re also looking to upskill our people in areas like design thinking through our leadership program. So that’s going quite well in lifting our capability and putting some meat on the bones of our innovation strategy.

I think the trick now is how you bring that through to production. We now have to carve out some funding and find those opportunities – that may even mean using things like hackathons to find those ideas.

PwC: So what’s the relationship between digital and the rest of the business?

Chris: For me, it’s about being more collaborative and participative with some common context and now we’re leading the charge on a lot of these initiatives. We’ve put 100 people from across the business through Agile training, and that’s not just from the IT team but across the organisation. So we’re really working in partnership with the business.

Our Leading Edge program where we develop leaders within the business has also been really good at bringing cohorts of people together from across the business and train them in areas like agile. That capability then feeds into the way we manage change, and they’re learning skills that are ready for the future.

PwC: With the increasing focus on digital, how hard is it to recruit people with digital skills?

Chris: I think there are a few hotspots out there where it’s hard to find people. In Information Security, there’s a real hotspot for talent. As organisations figure out how to build out from their legacy systems, everyone’s looking for people who can work on integration solutions. What I’m really keen to do is start working with the universities where students will work with us over the summer so we’re creating a new pipeline of talent, and also get insights into how millennials think and work – we can surely learn from them.

We’re working hard to improve how we engage with prospective and incoming employees who have those digital skills. For me, most people have a good story to tell about our brand, and that makes it easier.