The key message is that enterprises cannot afford to stand still as digital technologies continue to redefine the business and government landscape. Several factors, including faster broadband and more sophisticated e-commerce systems, are exposing Australian organisations to unprecedented competition both domestically and abroad.

Organisations who recognise the need for change can build a transformation agenda as set out by the IBM report in five steps below.

1. Establish your position quickly. Establish whether you are a leader or a follower within your market. A good way to look at this is to focus on metrics that indicate your ability to compete in the digital age. e.g. percentage of services or sales delivered online.

2. Clarify timing. How important is it to be a leader in your sector? How quickly are digital technologies impacting your industry and how fast is your organisation’s capacity to change? These are questions you need to consider when timing your digital transformation.

3. Identify levers for action. Review which ‘levers’ are available to your organisation to drive change. They may be how you deal with your customers, how you reinvent your work practices and incentives, how you manage your cost base, how you use technology and assets or how you engage with your stakeholders.

4. Set priorities. While all your levers of change are important, you will need to decide where to focus your efforts and in what time frames. Keep in mind the plans of your competitors and how each set of actions tie back to your transformation objectives. Be sure to track progress once your priorities have been decided.

5. Develop a transformation narrative. Create a ‘story’ that clearly expresses your current position, the need for change and your plan for the future. Undertake the narrative on both a high level and a detailed business level. Describe how time will be managed and set targets.

While the IBM research is targeted at generally larger enterprises, all local businesses can start by completing the online digital readiness diagnostic. The 25 question tool will help you understand where you currently stand and where you need to go.

The full report in detail and other resources are available from IBM for download.

• Supply gaps and unmet needs in the region
• Time – it will take up to ten years to roll the NBN out across the region
• Not all areas will receive 100Mbps

The RDA Hume Committee dedicated to implementing the strategy have committed to:

• Ensuring good working partnerships between the three tiers of government via the Hume strategy partnership group, NBN Co and other broadband and mobile providers
• Increasing the use of and access to existing public sector networks
• Exploring the creation of regional data centres in and for the Hume Region

Some longer-term actions that the region will examine include:

• Generating innovative solutions for improving wireless broadband supply
• Aggregating demand for and purchasing of high-speed broadband services to reduce cost and improve quality
• Exploring how to aggregate demand for and purchasing of of high speed services to reduce costs and improve quality

CASE STUDY: Public Sector Demand Aggregation – HumeNET
The HumeNET fibre, serving the Hume Regional Alliance, formed in 2006 and built on the former HumeNET Ltd and the Hume ICT Alliance, runs HumeNET, a broadband network linking healthcare centres. Service areas encompass acute health, community and primary health, and some local GP network connections. The Hume Rural Health Alliance spans regional hospitals, 14 community health providers and nine health information service providers. One of the local users of HumeNET, the Alexandra District Hospital, is consistently recognised as one of the leaders in the delivery or rural healthcare and has received awards and nominations in the Victorian Healthcare Awards every year since 2006.
As a member of the Hume Rural Health Alliance and long term user of the HumeNET fibre network, the experience of the hospital points to the opportunities associated with high-speed broadband access, but also where there remain important obstacles for further participation and use.

Do you have an opinion on how to maximise the use of the NBN in the region? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

The content from this post was extracted from our Digital Strategy which is available for download here.

Here is a recording of the webinar for those who want to recap on some of the topics discussed or for those who missed it.

Please leave your comments and feedback below. If you liked the webinar please share the recording by clicking on one of the social media icons below.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Click here to learn more about the conference.

The goal of the Broadband Smart House project is demonstrate the use of the real-world applications of the NBN, including home automation, remote health monitoring, video-conferencing, rehabilitation, education, remote business, sensor monitoring, and environmental sustainability.(Source: RDA Northern Inland, 2013)

A smart home in Armidale, NSW has been created to conduct live workshops & demonstrations on the benefits of this new technology. The house is fitted with functioning installations where a typical family of four can try out the new technologies. At first instance the house will also be used by local TAFE and University students to trial and demonstrate various cutting-edge projects across a range of areas.

Practical Benefits of Smart Homes

There a number of practical benefits of the smart house which have been demonstrated by the project. For example, video conferencing facilities can allow the aged to maintain relationships with their family doctor, without the need to travel to the surgery or to receive a home visit. Things such as blood pressure, pulse, oxygen saturation, weight and glucose can also be monitored by remote carers who can respond to alarming conditions. Watch the video below to learn about the benefits of the technology & examples of its applications.  

Watch this video on YouTube.

For a list of the benefits and themes visit  the Broadband smart house website by clicking here.

Participating partners in the project are Regional Development Australia Northern Inland, NSW Trade & Investment, ISU Solutions, CSIRO, The Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation, TAFE New England Institute, The University of New England, Armidale Dumaresq Council, Internode, Essential Energy and NBN Co.

Business overview

Kym & Kaye Bernardi have owned and operated the BIG4 Shepparton East Holiday Park for 14 years. They are an independent member of BIG4 Holiday Parks franchise, which has parks all around Australia. They currently have 23 self-contained cabins, 12 ensuite  powered sites, powered caravan & tent sites and 12 mobile homes. The park predominantly caters for the family market. Both Kym & Kaye have made significant capital investment into technology and their park ensuring it has some of the best family friendly facilities like giant jumping pillow, solar heated pool, synthetic grass tennis court, pedal go-karts, recreation room and camp kitchens.

Tell us about the web technologies you are using in the business

Website & Online Bookings

Our website is our key marketing tool. Our live online booking mechanism is vital, meaning that guests can book at any time of the day or night at their leisure. It also helps us to keep our staff focused on serving our customers better as opposed to the administration aspects of the business.  As an owner of the business I update the website as much as possible with fresh photographs, content, keywords, special offers and stock well in advance. Our website is also mobile friendly so that guests can use a smartphone to book while they’re on the road. This allows us to cater to last minute bookings with families who are on the road.

Image Source: Big4 Website, 2013

We also take bookings for our park via third party websites like Wotif, Need it Now, Bookeasy & other advertising sites such as Visit Victoria, Total Travel etc. These websites are not only good online booking sites but also good referral sites. However, to ensure we are on top of our game the listing needs to be managed – especially to to watch for both positive and negative comments and respond accordingly. I usually check these websites each week to add new photographs, content, special offers and see the comments & feedback about our park and respond to them.

To manage our listings on different websites we use a channel manager called Netroomz. The platform makes it easy to manage all third party sites in relation to both room availability and tariffs. The room allocation and tariffs are set through my front office reception computerised booking system and the channel manager takes the information from there. For example, if a person or family is booking a holiday with us via one of these websites, the Netroomz system talks to the back end of our website in real time to ensure that both the prices and rooms are available and the booking is confirmed. We can also set up promotion codes, show last minute bookings, get automatic email updates on stock levels, charge extra for optional extras like Wifi, breakfast and do a whole lot more. Besides the features we also learn more about our customers as it provides in-depth analytics by integrating with our Google Analytics system.

Social Media

Image Source: Big4 Website, 2013

We have also embraced social media through the use of Facebook and YouTube. These sites are essential to us to ensure in keeping up with the social media savvy market that we are endeavoring to capture.

Analytics

We make use of Google Analytics to keep track of movement on our website. This way we know where customers are coming from online, what interests them most, how they got to the website and what they purchased. We also use Google alerts which advises us whenever our name is mentioned on a website, blog or comment. Google is now fast becoming one of our largest referral sources.

What benefits have you gained from using these tools?

Increase in bookings

Our online bookings are ever increasing and our phone doesn’t ring as much as it once did, because consumers are making decisions and booking online based on what they can see on our website. This trend is rapidly growing and as such, is a cost effective way of both marketing and receiving bookings.

Reduction in marketing costs 

Social media is free and has the potential to reach a huge number of our target market. Before, we used to spend alot on newspaper ads, brochures, flyers etc with a limited number of responses back. I think people are now just programmed to ignore these ads to a certain extent. My focus now lies in using social media, referral websites and search engines to market my business. These are the areas where my customers search before they decide on their holiday destination and by me being there I am able to gain far more reach with a less amount of money spent. Over the years I have been using tutorials on social media to better understand how I can use these tools to cater to my customers needs and offer them what they are looking for from a holiday.

How do you plan to use high speed broadband in your business when the NBN arrives?

High speed broadband will be a fantastic improvement to our business as it will greatly increase efficiency in areas such as updating websites, channel managing our sites and uploading our YouTube videos. We will be able to react more quickly to changes we need to make to our sites. I seem to waste an inordinate amount of time waiting for websites to load – I look forward to this downtime being greatly reduced.

What advice do you have for other businesses who want to maximise their use of web technologies?

Embrace technology! Choose the type of technology which best suits your business and what you are trying to achieve with it, and then spend as much time on it as you can. It is increasingly more important to work on your business, not in your business.

Ken Clarke watching a dental procedure on Uni TV. (Source: IBES, 2013)

The Victorian Minister for Technology, The Hon Gordon Rich-Phillips officially switched on the Uni TV project on Friday 12 April at the Rural Clinical School in Shepparton.

About The Uni TV Project

The Uni TV project delivers dental education via Internet Protocol Television (IPTV). Dental education has usually been restricted to face to face interaction where students were forced to attend classes in person. However, with the launch of the program students can now view transmissions live and on demand of high-definition 2D and 3D images of procedures.

Final year students in the Doctor of Dental Science will trial this technology to enhance their learning. Uni TV provides them with a great opportunity to stay up to date with their course from a remote location. For example, students from the Rural Clinical School in Shepparton can access relevant material for their studies even while away from the main campus.

Speaking at the switch on, IBES Senior Research Fellow Ken Clarke said, “IPTV infrastructure was designed to be scalable. It can provide multiple simultaneous channels for many independent ‘broadcasters’. Various educational, community, and professional organisations could use IPTV to reach their own target audiences with specialised services supported by various business models.”

Uni TV is a partnership between the Melbourne Dental School and the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES), Ericsson Australia, AARNet and Panasonic Australia. It is supported by the Victorian Government’s Broadband-Enabled Innovation Program (BEIP).

• An estimated two-thirds of households and businesses in Victoria will not have access to NBN by 2016 which will mean high levels of unmet demand.
• Unmet demand in the Hume Region in 2011 was 13.6% of total premises within the region (for broadband greater than 8 and less than 50 mbps), and 12.5% for broadband greater than 50 mbps. This is estimated to increase to 43% by 2016.
• Mobile data demand is anticipated to grow rapidly.
• Dial-up data and fixed voice will continue to decline.

Detailed information by LGA in relation to unmet demand for broadband and demand for telecommunications estimates for 2016 can be sourced from the Telecommunications Spend and Demand in Victoria 2012 Report Final.

Are you living in one of these areas?  How do your expect your local community will embrace high speed broadband? Leave your comments below.