Smarter strategies to tackle tech's biggest questions

Technological advancements are happening at pace, but organisations can make the biggest impact by focusing investment in the right areas.

Technological advancements are happening at pace, but organisations can make the biggest impact by focusing investment in the right areas.

NTT DATA has partnered with The Australian to show how businesses can make strategic technology decisions for their future.

Organisations of all sizes, across a range of industries are battling with the same big technology questions: How can we safely incorporate AI at scale? And how can we strengthen our cybersecurity resilience?

They’re questions that should be at the top of any CEO’s agenda, according to NTT DATA ANZ CEO David McKeering.

He said that while businesses were facing other challenges – such as global economic volatility and a tight labour market – the importance of technology has drastically changed in the past two years. This is due to the widespread adoption of AI, where technology can now be an organisation’s competitive differentiator.

“The unprecedented rate of change means that the role of the CIO is critical – they need to lay out a technology strategy that enables long-term organisational success, as well as protect a business against a cybersecurity breach, which can have a long-lasting impact on the business,” Mr McKeering said.

“Many clients that we're working with today – whether government or private enterprise – are trying to navigate the board's expectation to move at speed by leveraging the benefits of AI, especially agentic AI.

“They are doing this while being challenged by the limitations of existing technology infrastructure that, unless upgraded, does not allow them to fully realise the cost and value outcomes from AI.”

Mr McKeering explained that in cybersecurity the question the board wanted to know was “Could this happen to us?” He said having the right processes and cyber resiliency in place is critical to be able to answer that.

He added that the key to a successful technology strategy today was to plan and invest in good technology foundations. This is often around core platform infrastructure that can then be the engine for long-term innovation, and allow the speed of adoption of new technology and resilience from emerging risks.

In most cases this will involve a critical review of the end-to-end technology “stack”, and stress-testing where the possible limitations or pain points are.

“When we do this, we often see a long-term underinvestment in infrastructure provides the most risk in enabling innovation. For example, legacy infrastructure may be the constraint to moving from innovative proof-of-concept AI projects to large-scale AI deployments,” Mr McKeering said.

TRUST IS KEY

No matter the industry, or size of an organisation, its ongoing success is built on a level of trust, Mr McKeering said.

“For any organisation that provides a service to a community or to another business, as soon as the trust piece has gone, their value to that client starts to erode,” he said.

To bolster this vital sense of trust, cybersecurity needs to be at the forefront of all systems.“

Cybersecurity is not just a point in time,” Mr McKeering said. “It's continuous across everything that we do in business.”

He said that by focusing on protecting data and intellectual property, an organisation is safeguarding themselves from the fallout of a cyber attack.

“For every CEO or anybody in any sort of position in a company where you're managing not only the data, but the intellectual property, you’re focused on customer trust.

“No one is exempt from this, from the biggest enterprises, to the government, to the small and medium enterprises as well. Cyber security is a critical part of showing you are a safe business to partner with.”

WHY AI WILL NEVER BE SET AND FORGET

AI – and now more specifically agentic AI – is being embraced globally as a new way to bring value through competitive differentiation and cost efficiencies.

But Mr McKeering warned that a successful AI strategy would always involve people.

“(It’s important) that ideas generated by AI are vetted, refined, and then guided by human review, and that ethical consideration is taken around what’s appropriate.”

He said that if organisations did this well, there were incredible opportunities – and not just for efficiency gains.

“We are seeing clients starting to use AI in the development of new services or products, which has introduced new revenue streams,” he added.

But Mr McKeering warned that while using AI in this way might be tempting for a lot of organisations, it was always crucial to keep the end user in mind.

He said that by partnering with NTT DATA – an organisation with global expertise, strong local presence and extensive research in the best ways to use AI – business leaders could get support when making these critical decisions.

“We can use predictive analytics, so clients can anticipate outcomes about any new services before they hit the market.”

These insights are drawn from global learnings, as well as extensive investments in research and development, enabling NTT DATA to provide effective technology strategies for each organisation they partner with.

“We focus on the business outcome that our clients are trying to achieve, and work with them to use technology as an enabler to get that outcome,” Mr McKeering said.

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