REDD – Business and Technology Podcast Episode 009 with Sanja Marais

Posted on November 16, 2022 in Podcast

In Episode 009 of REDD’s Business and Technology Podcast our hosts Jackson Barnes (BDM – REDD), Brad Ferris (CEO – REDD) interview Sanja Marais, General Manager Technology and Innovation at Aspen Medical.

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanja-marais-2981487b/

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You can read the full transcript below:

– Hello and welcome to “REDD’s Business and Technology Podcast.” I’m your host, Jackson Barnes.

– And I’m your co-host, Brad Ferris.

– Earlier today, we sat down with Sanja Marais, who’s a general manager of technology and innovation at Aspen Medical. She went through her story and all of the innovation she’s put in place into the healthcare sector and future plans. Brad, what did you take out of the episode?

– Look, I really enjoyed catching up with Sonja today. She’s a big personality, and it was a great story of perseverance and determination. Effectively having to start all over again in Australia with a young family, and then working her way back up to a very senior role, as you said, GM of taking innovation at quite a large company, being Aspen Medical. So really bubbly, lot of energy, lot of drive. I really respect that in people. So yeah, it was a really good chat.

– Looking forward to seeing where her career goes and where Aspen goes. All right, let’s cut over to the episode. Sanja, thanks for coming in. Really appreciate your time. I know you’re extremely busy. You look after a lot of people and a lot of information and a lot of systems. So looking forward to getting some insights out of you around medical and technology and innovation that you are doing. Did you want to touch on your background, Sanja, before we jump into Aspen Medical and what you’re working on?

– Yeah, absolutely. And you know, this might be a shock because I don’t know that a lot of people know my background. So obviously from my accent, you can hear I’m foreign, you know, or maybe not, I don’t know. You know, some people say they did.

– I did detect something there.

– South Africa, born and bred. My husband and I set up quite a big company back in South Africa, but my, let’s take it back to uni. So university, I started studying accounting, looked around and decided that I will not last with my fellow classmates, you know, so I changed my degree. So I majored in industrial psychology. So basically background in industrial psychology, worked in our own business in HR, set up a few systems and realized I actually am quite, you know, I’m enjoying working in systems and stuff. Came to Australia on a skilled visa and was going to Canberra and people say, “Why?” You know, Canberra gave us a chance and couldn’t find a job because it’s all federal and if you’re not a citizen, it’s quite hard to work in federal government.

– Oh, yeah. How many years ago was that?

– [Sanja] So 12.

– Why did you pick Canberra?

– Canberra picked us. Yeah, I got a skilled visa, 176 at the time. So it’s really, really, it was really good for us. And so then I thought it was time to just, you know, re-engineer myself and change careers. So I started teaching at the local TAFE, you know, did a few courses there.

– What were you teaching?

– So managing human resources information systems. A few, you know, suit full type subjects. I also thought it would be good, I always wanted to be a Pussycat Doll. That never happened. So I went and became a Zumba instructor.

– Oh!

– Yeah, so I did Zumba. I have a background in styling, so I’m an image consultant. Did a bit of that and then got a job as a project coordinator on an IT project. So I had to start really from scratch, but that was awesome because I just, I think, you know, it lays the foundation for you to understand what’s needed in tech and tech projects. I also booked people’s travel. I did very well. Did meticulously well. And so that was I think where my IT career started 12 years ago. And in health, so I’ve been in the health industry for 12 years in IT various roles, analyst roles, you know, managing a bit of infrastructure. Always had quite a big view on security and cybersecurity as well.

– Which hopefully we’ll touch on that. So your first segue into IT was first like HR systems and then as a project coordinator in healthcare?

– In healthcare. So I worked, can I say who I worked for?

– [Jackson] Yeah, yeah, that’s up to you.

– I’m saying it, Medibank.

– We were going to leave that to you.

– Brad leaked that out.

– That’s what I’m saying.

– You know, I had really good opportunities there. And Medibank had the immigration visa medical, you know, health contract, and they helped the department at that stage to implement the new e-medical system. So it was really good exposure. And yeah, I worked on that project, and then moved over to the Garrison contract, which was one of the defense contracts. Major contract with big exposure for me, getting into data analytics, and then of course, you know, all the infrastructure systems.

– How did you progress so fast? Like there’s some pretty big heavy-hitting projects from just entering IT as a project coordinator.

– I think because I’ve been on the top and then I, you know, I had to start all over. And if you’ve been on the top, you know, you know how to get there.

– [Jackson] Okay.

– Yeah, so you just, you’re a bit strategic, and I’ve got skills, man.

– Yeah, many various skills and energy.

– Yeah.

– I think people just needed to see my skills, you know, in action. But no, it’s been a massive learning curve, and I think one of the things that I can say is I learn quickly, very, very quickly, and I read a lot. And those two things and being able to then, you know, I think back it up with a bit of tenacity and attitude. Yeah, that helped.

– Awesome. I’m glad you mentioned that. I’m glad you mentioned data and cyber, and I definitely want to touch on that later. Not so much Medibank, we might definitely have to cut that one out. But Aspen Medical, did you go through Aspen Medical? So you’ve been in what role you’re in now, how long you’ve been there and what they do?

– So Aspen is really interesting. When I left Medibank, I decided to just take a bit of time off, and then I was going to reevaluate what I wanted to do. So I set up my own consulting business, like everyone does. Marais Consulting very, you know, innovative. But I got then approached by Aspen, and one of my previous managers actually worked at Aspen. So he said, “Let’s have a chat.” And I started with Aspen, you know, with one job. I had to implement the new clinical system. So I actually came in to do that. And he retired, and then I basically stepped, you know, into that role that I am today, which, you know, started out Aspen was a very different business, you know, when I started 12 years ago. Much smaller and maybe not as much as a view on global as we we have today.

– Okay, so what, say was it three years ago you started Aspen?

– It’s almost six.

– Almost six, okay.

– 2017, on April Fool’s Day, 1st of April.

– Yeah. What did Aspen look like six years ago?

– I think very project-based. So, you know, Aspen is really agile, very good at setting projects up and you know, go wherever we need it, so we can go and really deploy anywhere. So I think they, in Australia as well, a little bit smaller, globally as well. And not as diverse, perhaps, as we are today. We’ve got a lot more business lines, you know, going today. So I think, yeah, it’s, you know, I feel like we were, I knew everyone in Aspen. I could look at our active directory and I say, “Oh yeah, they in Canberra.” Now I look at it and I go, “I dunno.” You know, there’s so many people.

– Yeah, so for some context for listeners. Sanja is the general manager of technology and innovation at Aspen Medical. Did you, I guess, let’s go to current state. How big is the Aspen team and your team?

– So again, very interesting because that is, depends on the day that you ask me. We have around 2,000 employees around the world and there’s a lot of employees coming in and out because the nature of what we do is we will have a quite transient workforce, but they’re always with us. So they might be alumni, they might be sitting on our bench, you know, they might be actively working. We have some of the contracts that we do is where we do placements. So we will place a locum or a doctor in a position to sub for one of the governments where somebody go on leave. So, you know, there’s a lot of that going on. And my team, so that’s the Aspen composition basically. And we work across the world. So US, UAE, Saudi, Indonesia, Fiji, BNG, you know, where we are actively at the moment. My team isn’t very big, so I think I’ve got 15 people in my team, but with very different skill sets. You know, if you look at our team and you think you’re going to find, you know, a textbook idol IT team, nah, it’s not going to happen.

– No service desk and two engineers?

– No, I’ve got a service desk which is outsourced.

– Okay.

– And I do not have any engineers, but I’ve got one solutions developer.

– Okay. What do the rest of the people do?

– So I’ve got business transformation change management. You know, I think it’s my background from industrial psychology, I think IT needs to have a new face, more human centric, because we’ve seen, we’ve implemented massive systems, and if you don’t do it with a changed, you know, management perspective first, yeah, it’s just not going to work very well. So I’ve got that. I’ve got, I’m trying to think. I’ve got an internal help desk, but they’re more the human face of, you know, I have a problem with the system, they can take people through more of a training type thing as well. So, yeah.

– Yeah, that’s fair enough. I guess I asked that because that’s a lot of people for no engineers to, I guess, support, but that makes a lot of sense.

– So you’re running the whole IT team throughout the business, effectively.

– [Sanja] Yes.

– Okay.

– So we run the whole IT team. And we have done a lot of transformation. I suppose we’ll talk about that. But, you know, how we’ve moved from very resource-intensive type architecture and infrastructure to where we are today.

– Yeah.

– I want to touch on, that was probably my next question, Sanja, was what have you achieved so far at Aspen?

– I’ll have some wine and then I’ll tell you. So I achieved my first job on time, under budget. You know, I think that’s why they might have kept me. But I think one of the things that was a major, and you talk about digital transformation, and people do it and they don’t even know it. And I think we were on that journey without knowing the appetite of Aspen to actually change over from, you know, server-based, very fragmented clinical systems to a cloud-based, synchronized, you know, one platform was in itself digital transformation. The one thing that I’m very proud of is that we made the move to, at that stage, Office 365, but Microsoft. Because when the pandemic hit, we could all just take our laptops and, you know, it was as if nothing happened. No, it happened, but I mean, you know, from a work perspective, people were okay. They could work.

– Yeah. And I’d say it’s like, I don’t want to speak out of turn here, but healthcare providers typically are the most paper-based and backwards on digital transformation. So it would’ve been, I guess a journey, ’cause telling doctors and GPs and locums that they need to do this now. How did you go with that change management and why was it so successful?

– I think it started from the top down because we had to pitch to the board why we wanted to spend all this money. You know, they love the Microsoft perpetual license because you pay for it, and you know, every few years, Microsoft updates. But it was a pitch from the board and I think, you know, the MD and the CEO, they really threw their weight behind it. So I think it’s because they manage it from the top down. And I think that’s why it’s a success. I’ve always tried to get the stakeholders engaged top down, and then, you know, you manage it with the business. And not making it an an IT project, making it a business project. IT is just a facilitator. And I think that that has been really successful in our approach as well.

– It sounds like you’ve definitely done a lot of data-focused work in the past around systems and change management and making it a business problem, not just a technology problem, which is probably a testament to why you’ve been so successful. How does Aspen leverage data for better outcomes?

– We’re in the health industry, and you know, you rely on data to improve. And I think we always say measure what you can change, right? And what you can affect. And for us it’s, we have a lot of data. We have, especially now with our business transformation. As you go from fragmentation and, you know, legacy systems, you become more centralized. So your data comes into central platforms. So just the migration, we rip and replace about eight systems with our new ERP and HM system which we implemented. All of that data is coming in, and we’re going, “Oh my goodness.” We’ve never seen all of this data. So there’s a bit of a journey for us in terms of our, I think our data strategy and our data architecture and what we’re going to do. How are we going to analyze it? From a clinical perspective, we do have a lot of data as well. We work with the government, you know, we work everywhere. So it’s really important that our chief medical officer has a great view on that data and, you know, can we influence population health? Can we influence predictive analysis in terms of health and outcomes that we have for patients. So we do use the data a lot, but for us now is almost say, you know, data 3.0, but that’s a cliche. But let’s say data 3.0 for Aspen Medical.

– Yep.

– And where we’ll go with the data next, because there’s so many opportunities. And now we, I think for us as well, it’s assessing the data literacy within Aspen Medical, because, you know, it’s great that there’s so much data, but I don’t know what people’s abilities to consume that data and to work with it and analyze it. So we will do a bit of a data literacy, you know, exercise and understand the user’s level of data literacy and then try and put that into our digital strategy as well.

– Hmm, okay. That’s something REDD does for a lot of businesses. Reimagine Everything Done Digitally is what REDD stands for, and we’re big on data and empowerment. So that that’s good to hear. I want to touch on cyber. Cyber is probably a massive thing for Aspen medical and yourself, with a being background, not just being Medicare, but also being a large healthcare provider, like 2000 users across the globe as well as we got a lot of information there to protect. How do you go about cybersecurity?

– We have definitely made a concerted effort. I would say probably about three years ago we really started honing in on, how do we embed cybersecurity as a culture within Aspen Medical? Otherwise it’s just a second thought. You need to try and embed it within the business. And I think that was our approach, again, trying to take everyone on a journey. I’m so full of cliches. It’s a journey. But anyway, it is a journey, because otherwise people just don’t buy into it right.

– Yeah.

– So we started to look at, you know, our perimeter. How do we, because we have, you know, we push the edge of our network. We have so many people working remotely, like in very remotely, you can’t even, you know, there’s countries that you don’t even know of where some of our staff work. So it was really important to do a bit of a stock take to see where our users are, how do they use our IT, not to stifle them, so, you know, that they’re still able to work, but to make it really secure. So from a systems perspective, we try to implement a lot of cybersecurity systems that can help us with, you know, with that. And then there’s the human element. And I think we all know that that is one of the hardest, you know, you can’t-

– Yep. Someone’s going to click that button.

– You only need one out of 2,000 to do the wrong thing. And for us it’s about cyber awareness, and that’s where the culture comes in. So trying to really talk about it. I have really fantastic buy-in from the board and from, again, from our CEO and the owner of the business. I present at the board. So it is an agenda item. They take it very seriously. We involve the board in cyber exercises. We do them and we make sure that they’re involved. And then I love phishing, everyone. It’s like, so nice. You know, I love it.

– Chuck a few tests in there.

– Chuck a few tests in there, but it’s not just about that. I think it’s about, you know, building resilience with our users, and they can expect everything. And I make them nasty, you know?

– [Jackson] Yeah, right.

– So that’s one of the things. And then cyber awareness training. We did quite a big campaign with Cyber Awareness Month that ends on Monday. You know, lots of training, lots of talking about it and making it topical, providing tips and things that people can share with their families, just not in the, you know, because it happens everywhere, it impacts everyone. So that’s our approach. We know it’s not perfect. We’re constantly looking out for snake oil. Everyone wants to sell you all of their systems and they promise you they can, you know, prevent cyber attacks. But I think at the end of the day it’s, you know, you have to just have everyone working and your systems all work together. Otherwise there’s holes.

– What do you do with your simulated phishing attack results? I’m curious.

– You know what, we look at them.

– [Jackson] Yeah.

– And I suppose it’s about, so we have quite a good system where we do all of our phishing and stuff, and it assigns a risk score to a user. And it’s about really looking at that risk score and then, without targeting anyone, we want to make it, because we don’t want to victimize or make people feel silly. You sort of use that to hone in on training opportunities and development opportunities. And it’s about sitting with people and saying, “Hey, we know you’ve now clicked three times on a phishing attempt. Let’s sit down and work through how we can empower you to be able to not do that again.” And help them through that. Because sometimes people just don’t understand when there’s a hyphen in a domain that can mean that, you know, that’s actually the difference between the real domain and not. So once you point it out in a bit of one-on-one, it actually makes a massive difference.

– Yeah, that would for sure. All right, I wanted to touch on the other part of your title is in technology innovation. What innovation have you done in Aspen over the last six years?

– Okay. So besides the digital transformation, I think what we’ve done is we started internally first. So look at opportunities within the business. And there were so many opportunities where we could streamline. And again, you know, people say, “Yeah, but that’s just BAU.” It’s not really BAU because by some of that innovation, we also upskilled our own team. And when the opportunity presented in Covid, we could be very confident to actually go out to clients and the government and build those same solutions that we’ve built in-house and actually, you know, have a commercial solution for our clients. So things that we’ve done, we have a RTO. So we’ve got an in-house training capability.

– [Jackson] Okay.

– And we’ve always built learning management systems for our own staff and, you know, done a bit of integration with other systems. So when Covid happened, we were able to work with the Department of Health and have a national training platform, which all of you might have done the Covid-19 training, because we’ve seen that certificate. And I think over 6.7 million enrollments to date.

– Wow.

– Yeah, which is fantastic.

– I don’t know if I did any Covid training. Did you?

– I mean, there was lots of training thrown out.

– Maybe we did, it was so much that time it to QR code in-

– I remember the testing when I went to get the jab, I’m sure that was on Power platform.

– Ah.

– The database looked to be, or at least the interface was.

– Yeah, where-

– Where did you get your jab?

– I got it done at Ipswich, actually.

– Yeah, because we also built the software for the respiratory clinic. So the GP led respiratory clinics around the country. There were about 150 that the government put up, and we designed the software.

– Wow, so actually that, what is the core business of Aspen?

– You know, do you have time? Let’s have some wine, and you know It is, fundamentally we provide health professionals. So we would go to a client. So we have clients, you know, we have oil and gas clients, we have hospital clients, we have organizations, governments, where we would provide the health professionals. So we would either supplement their existing workforce or we would run a clinic or run a hospital or do things. So that’s Aspen Medical. One of the things, a really good example because people always ask what you do. Think about Ebola in, you know, in West Africa.

– [Jackson] Yep.

– We actually ran that Ebola clinic there and built the capacity locally. You know, we showed the local people how to do infection control and all of those things, and we ran that clinic on behalf of the New Zealand government, Australia government.

– So kind of like an outsourced set of-

– Outsourced health provider.

– Kind of like we are an outsourced tech provider.

– We’re an outsourced health provider.

– Okay. And let’s have some wine conversation is because of that, we come across various other opportunities in the market. So we also do aeromedical evacuations, we’ve got our own aircraft set out in Karratha. We have rotary and fix wing. So we will repatriate people from difficult situations in the oil and gas industry. We work with Queensland Health here in Queensland out of Avcair, and we do some of the repatriation there, we have advisory services.

– There’s a lot. I looked on the website and there was a lot of service lines.

– That’s what I’m saying, there’s so many service lines. It’s very much health-related, but also I think it’s our opportunity to scale and be agile and do new things that’s really good. And health infrastructure is something that we are really getting into now as well.

– So your clients are Queensland Health or government, like New Zealand government, for example, for that example you just mentioned. So they are essentially your client and you are providing a unique service around healthcare to that government or Queensland Health, for example?

– Exactly. And the World Health Organization, so we are the only commercial emergency medical team certified by the Health World Health Organization on outbreaks. So that is quite good because we can go when there’s like an Ebola endemic, they’re not a pandemic, we can go and we can work there under the, you know, WHO direction.

– So 2,000 staff. Now, prior to Covid, what kind of staff did you have back then?

– It’s always hovered because of the, like I said, the nature of our workforce. So always around 300 to 400 permanent staff. We obviously scaled up with Covid because of the vaccination projects and the respiratory clinic, a lot of projects that we’ve done around the world. And we’ve also since, you know, started on the Fiji project. Now I’m not even counting all the hospital staff that, you know, work with us in Fiji. In the UAE we had to supplement, actually, the Department of Health in the UAE. We delivered 1,200 medical staff to help with the Covid effort in the UAE.

– And then when you do that, so you, so you mentioned 300 to 400 permanent staff. So then you’ll go to market, effectively, recruit who you need for a project, train them in your systems, your policies and process, and then kind of deploy them?

– Absolutely. And one thing that we’re very proud of is, I suppose in the clinical sense, is the credentialing. So, you know, having a clear set of credentials and having a big, I don’t want to call it a bench, but we call them alumni. But we have a lot of health staff that, you know, has their records with us and they keep current, so they would, you know, with currency and all of their qualifications. So when there’s a project, they love to come and work with us. So they will go where they permanently work, maybe put in leave and come and work with Aspen on an Ebola project or Iraq clinic or something like that.

– So they take leave from their current job and just they get an exciting project to go overseas and help out, essentially.

– Especially in the humanitarian space, yeah.

– Yeah I was, I going to ask how you find people, because I saw there was news out like, like last week on paying rural GPs 500 grand a year and a free house to go to regional areas in Queensland.

– Yeah, I saw that. Where was that, just outside of Mount Isa?

– Yeah, something like that. I mean, so how do you find people, like healthcare professionals, which is such a, like a scarce resource, to be honest?

– I think it’s a, you know, resource and talent is a massive issue everywhere. But we’ve been in the business for quite a while, since 2003. So we’ve got some clinicians that’s been with Aspen for a very long time and they, you know, word of mouth, they talk to other clinicians, and I think the stuff that we do is exciting, and that’s why, you know, people love to come and work with us on some of these humanitarian projects and interesting projects. And yeah, we’re a good company to work for. So, you know, people will go there. They will just naturally be drawn to where it’s good to work, I think.

– That’s fair enough. That’s why we have big on culture here and we’ve got, you know, a kitted out office and that kind of thing. We’re big on culture. Like last Friday, Brad was diffusing bombs with BI headsets on. Didn’t do very well, unfortunately.

– Lucky to still be here.

– Yeah.

– How’s that, actually? How remote is your workforce? How’s your work from home? Do you have most people in the office, 50/50? What’s that look like?

– I think it’s changed with Covid as well. And because we had to scale, you know, the Canberra office can only take, say, 80 people. We then had to acquire more offices, you know, and levels to be able to take that workforce. But there is a good balance between working from home, being in the office. And of course most of our healthcare staff are out on sites or client sites. So we have the, I would say the support services type staff working in the offices. And very good remote flexibility. I know my own team, most of them are in Canberra, and I’ve got about three or four people here. We will choose a day where we are all in the office at the same time for a bit of team building, and then we have a roster. So there’s at least a certain amount of us in the office at any given time. So just for that visibility, it’s good.

– Yeah.

– So you mentioned prior as well, you’ve got exciting kind of break off company to Aspen, the Aspen Group. Did you want to, I guess, touch on what that is?

– Yes, absolutely. So I’ll cheers to that.

– Cheers.

– Cheers. So it is very exciting, and because Aspen grow and we grow, you know, in all different directions, we know that we can do technology. We’ve got, you know, large scale, I think, experience. We designed apps for internally and for our clients, and we’ve now decided to venture out and register Aspen Technology. So we will soon be a technology provider in our own right, I would want to say. And that’s super exciting for us.

– That’s super exciting. Congratulations for getting that across the line. So you are starting Aspen Technology, and what’s the vision for that entity?

– The vision for that entity is, you know, really to, and again, I’m so passionate about bringing humans into tech. It’s to empower and delight humans with technology. And to look for problems that’s here today, not going to design the technology and then find the problem. And I think designing now for into the future, it needs to be scalable and it needs to have a lifespan so, you know, people can get to love it and then grow with it.

– So you’re planning on, I guess, looking at what technology problems the healthcare sector has, which has probably many, to be honest, like they’re historically very paper-based, and new into getting infrastructure into the cloud and that kind of thing. So you are going to look back into hospitals and GP practices and that kind of thing and look for technology problems and then it go as Aspen Technology and find out how to solve those problems?

– A little bit of that, yes. But I think the good thing about Aspen Technology is we didn’t call it Aspen Medical Technology for a reason, because we don’t just want to focus on medical. I think there’s so much application for, you know, technology to span across sectors, and we think that if you roll out one platform, it’s just, you know, for one, we don’t want to do that. And that’s why I say that’s scalability. We are looking at definitely something to do with health, but health across sectors, not just in the health sector.

– Okay, and what was the reason for wanting to start this new entity? Because I mean there had to be a big, massive, I guess, reason to start a separate thing, not just one little project, right? What was the, I guess, business case you had to put forward for starting Aspen Technology?

– I think the success we had in really delivering scalable solutions, and we’ve always been quite progressive with technology in Aspen, in terms of wanting to do more. You know, if there’s a problem with one of our clients, we would go out and do a solution. So I can give you a small case study or small stories. When we were at the height of the rapid antigen tests, where they were like computers and chairs in the beginning of, you know, when you couldn’t get any, our clients also had to, you know, adopt that. And there wasn’t any platforms available where you could basically support at-home testing and supervised testing. It was just not, and the way that our clients wanted to do it. So we designed the app internally and rolled it out within a week. And that’s a nice thing, we can be very agile. Rolled it out within a week, minimum viable product. I always say that, I know people hate that word, but it’s a iterative approach, right? And it worked so well. And it worked exactly how our clients wanted to do it. So we know we can do that. And we want to be known for technology, not just for being a, you know, outsource health professional provider.

– So it’s not consulting, you’re actually going to develop solutions.

– I suppose there will be a bit of consulting as well, you know, because we can consult if we need to. But it’s mostly delivering product. And whether it’s through M and I or whether it’s organic, you know, it doesn’t really matter, but we really want to also have our own product out in the market.

– [Brad] Okay.

– That’s quite exciting.

– Very exciting.

– Keen to watch that journey as it unfolds.

– Yeah. ‘Cause the core business is really all services, isn’t it? Aspen Medical.

– All services health, yes.

– [Brad] Yes, all health services, yep.

– I’m excited to watch that journey as it unfolds.

– Yeah, that’s cool.

– Anything else you wanted to touch on, Sanja?

– Well I think it’s exciting that, you know, I’m sitting here in REDD’s office today because we really want to, you know, we are going to work with REDD, and I think we started, I’ve met Nigel a long time ago. Never knew that our paths would cross again, and me being in Brisbane. But I think, you know, it’s so exciting. We love to collaborate with other companies. Like I said, we don’t run IT in-house, mostly outsource, and I think that’s the strength of you get the best in the business to work with. So, you know, focusing on things like data, Office 365, Microsoft 365, because I think a lot of that’s underutilized.

– [Jackson] Definitely is.

– And one of my strategic directives in the business is to optimize Microsoft 365. We base so much, it’s one of your most expensive licenses if you think about it. It’s most underutilized product in businesses. So for us it’s about how do I get my users’ upskill to use the most and and to get the most out of that product as well.

– Yeah, the Microsoft Suite has evolved a bucket load, and you see it definitely in small businesses where they put in Business Premium, for example, and don’t use any of the functionality. They pay an extra $10 a user, and they get literally no benefit, but they get told they need to go to Business Premium. So yeah, there is a lot more in the Microsoft stack and it’s evolved so much over the past two years alone. So that’s pretty exciting. Right, thanks Sanja, we really appreciate you coming in. You’ve provided some good insights on your career in technology, going from owning a business overseas, coming into Canberra, learning how to do systems and information management and then IT projects and everything else you’ve done, which I’ll stop talking, ’cause I’ll go for a while. Really appreciate you coming in.

– That was really, really good. Thank you, guys. Appreciate you inviting me.

– [Jackson] Thanks, Sanja.

– Cheers.

 

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