We were extremely fortunate this week to have some of the largest technology companies in the world deliver presentations in our city at the inaugural diga.tech conference, organised by a very progressive Dubbo Chamber of Commerce.
Speakers from Microsoft; NBN; Xero; CBA; Amazon and Telstra were at the conference with a view to tomorrow’s technology today. Many people may have viewed this type of conference as only for tech geeks but on the contrary – and I admit to a heavy bias here – a business that does not use technology is a business that is on its way to oblivion. There may be arguments from many people that their business does not rely on technology but one small statistic hit the mark on Tuesday. Trent Innes, the Managing Director of cloud accounting app Xero, noted that businesses that invoice electronically and allow electronic payments will receive their payments, on average, 23 per cent faster than those that use non-electronic invoicing and payment methods. Think of a simple example. Imagine a small window cleaning business where a single operator has been visiting homes of clients for the last thirty years. When the business first started, the operator would turn up and clean the windows and the home-owner would pay cash and the window cleaner would walk away and later record the cash sales for full declaration of income, of course. Jump forward to today and less than 30 per cent of all payments in Australia (and less than 20 per cent in the US) are made with cash. The home-owners now want to pay electronically. The window cleaner now has to finish the job and go home and write up the invoice and post it out and wait for the payment to come through. The alternative is that they use a cloud accounting app, like Xero, and the minute they finish the job the window-cleaner pulls a smartphone from the back pocket and invoices the job on the spot and the customer has it in their inbox within seconds. Going a step further, the window-cleaner can then use a mobile payments app and receive electronic payment on the spot. Suddenly, for a business that thinks they are excluded from the technology game, they are swept up as part of the technology revolution.
What was absolutely clear during diga.tech is that all businesses are impacted by technology and progressive businesses need to embrace and utilise technology. Brett McCallum from Telstra delivered some results from a recent small business survey conducted by Telstra. Despite the general acceptance that technology is vital in all businesses, it was interesting to note that only 50 per cent of small businesses currently have a Web site and only 66 per cent have a social media presence. Many of those businesses with a social media presence think that a weekly update of their social media presence is acceptable. When you consider that the average social media user checks their information a minimum of five times a day, a weekly update is simply not enough. To ensure your business at least keeps up to date with your competitors, the one-day conference highlighted that technology needs to be a major piece of the thought process of every business.
Andrew Boyd from Amazon delivered a session that was as much business coaching as it was technology delivery. Amazon already have a presence of over 1,000 people in Australia as part of their global workforce of 520,000 people. That is a workforce larger than the population of Australia’s capital city!
Andrew discussed some business ideas that are used by Amazon. There are two main points that resonated well with attendees. The first was that the way to increase innovation in any business is to lower the cost of failure. It makes sense. A business can try different ideas and not be too concerned if they don’t work – provided there is not a large cost to the business. The second point highlighted by Amazon was one of their internal mechanisms, for a company that is the self-proclaimed king of customer centricity. The ‘red chair’. Every internal meeting, every discussion, every planning session has a physical chair that is coloured red. That red chair is the virtual “relentlessly dissatisfied” customer that sits in the room and hears every discussion. It helps a business ensure that every idea has the customer at the front of mind. The concept was a much-discussed item at the conference and I expect the sales of red chairs in Dubbo to go up in the next week!
There is no doubt that there is an appetite for this type of technology conference in Dubbo and I look forward to future events along the same theme.
Mathew Dickerson