Author: Greg Spencer

Greg is a Founding Partner of Beyond Technology Consulting. Having held a number of senior executive positions in the past in a variety of technology industries; these roles included Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Network & Operations and Chief Operations Officer. Greg’s engineering qualifications provides a sound technology base and he still retains solid technical credentials in IP and application network architectures today. With over twenty years of industry technology management experience, Gregory is now part of the Beyond Technology Consulting team providing specialist strategy, telecommunications, business alignment, transformation management and consulting skills.

Are Cyber Security self assessments useful?

Posted on by Greg Spencer

In the world of cyber defences, our government often talks up self-assessment tools to be part of the community’s cyber security solution. I am often asked by boards and executives “Are they useful?”, and of course the answer is “well, it depends on what you are using it for”. Self-assessment tools are obviously flawed for any sort of governance objective, however clearly any thought given by your CIO or IT manager to understanding their circumstances and defences is better than none at all. Independent expert assessments, audits or health checks are always going to be the better choice as they don’t suffer from the key dangers of self-assessment processes. A false sense of security that is given by an inaccurate self-assessment is often more dangerous than no assessment at all. We have reviewed countless self-assessment reports, that not only paint a rosier picture than reality, but also hides a complete misunderstanding of the goals and objectives of required security controls.  

Often a more important question for executives responsible for cyber resilience and security governance is not about the importance of independence, but the difference between a “Review” and an “Audit”.

So how does an Independent Cyber Security Review and an Independent Cyber Security Audit differ? This can generally be found in the intent and therefore the focus of the advice and recommendation that should be part of the deliverable. Audits will often target testing controls and confirming compliance, whereas Reviews will similarly consider controls & capabilities but will focus on the gap analysis of these capabilities to the business’ requirements, and the opportunity assessment for improvement. Cyber security is a constantly moving target, and to win the arms race you need “actionable advice” on where to focus improvement efforts not just a list of controls that are not effective.

As Beyond Technology is Australia’s leading Independent bespoke mid-tier technology advisory, we provide both independent Review and Audit services and will often combine a review and audit process to produce a hybrid outcome that benchmarks capabilities and confirms governance, while providing “actionable advice” on your improvement roadmap. If you know of an organisation that need assistance with independent cyber assessments or audit – then let them know that Beyond Technology can help.

Network Outages and Single Points of Failure

Posted on by Greg Spencer

The recent Optus outage has been a stark reminder to many boards and executives of the importance of understanding your cyber resilience. In our increasingly digital environment, a network outage caused by a technical failure or a malicious cyber event can cripple businesses and let customers down. Knowing your technical single points of failures and deliberately planning to eliminate them, or knowing the workaround ahead of time should be standard in any business. As many of our clients can attest to, understanding your carrier network architecture and the use of appropriate levels of technology and carrier diversity  is critical in todays software defined and NBN based wide area networks.

As a leading independent technology advisory, Beyond Technology is ideally placed to help organisations gain a clear understanding on their technology weak points by undertaking a Cyber Resilience Assessment. Armed with this knowledge that is free from bias and conflicts of interest, your organisation can then develop its Cyber Resilience Strategy and Action plan to mitigate failure risk of your business critical digital systems.

For those organisations that directly felt the pain of the Optus outage, and those who felt lucky to have been reliant on a different carrier – Now is the time to act. Don’t wait for the inevitable next major event to occur or expect regulators to step in and magically make carrier and technology services fail-proof. Get expert assistance to know your vulnerabilities and plan to avoid critical business impacts. Customers have a right to feel let down by Optus, but not knowing or planning for your single point technical and supplier vulnerabilities is something that you have control over.

If you know of an organisation that need assistance with a Cyber Resilience Assessment or Response planning – then let them know that Beyond Technology can help.

Network Transformation Planning

Posted on by Greg Spencer

As Beyond Technology nears the end of a very large (700+ site) network transformation program, I have taken time to look back and consider why the program has been so successful and how we have been able to assist our client to materially change their digital agility and readiness for ongoing business productivity improvements.

An organisations network is foundational, when it is poorly performing its almost impossible for the IT function to build or maintain credibility with the business. When the architecture is legacy, or the operational strategy is non-ideal, the IT function can’t respond quickly enough to the business, is constantly on the back foot with regards to security, and never have the budget or time to be proactive in delivering improved capabilities to the business.

When your Network, Telecommunications and operational strategies are aligned with the digital aspirations of the business – you have a highly performant, scalable, reliable, efficient, secure and cost effective foundation to build your broader digital business evolution. 

The telecommunication landscape and contemporary network architectures is fundamentally different to where it was just 5 years ago.  The fundamental evolution of the industry through the NBN build, Covid impacts and the global cyber security degradation has left technology leaders without lived experience to assist in the navigation of the transformation objectives. Both carriers and network vendors are struggling with the shifting dynamics of the market and clients are finding that they have a limited window to decide on the optimal transformation approach and how to get the most out of their budget.

We have found that our experience and expertise has provided our clients the air cover that they need to shift their focus from the weeds of the network transformation, to the truly unique value add opportunities in their business. Having the confidence that the network transformation program will deliver them the correct balance of cost/risk/performance/agility has provided the opportunity to engage with the business on specific and impactful digital transformation projects that rely on the solid network infrastructure foundation.

The network transformation agenda needs to reduce operational complexity (more people managing the network is not an option), improve reliability (24*7 high avaliability is always mandatory), improve performance (bandwidth requirements keep growing and network destinations keep changing), improve security (network threats grow every hour), and reduce/avoid costs (do more with less, rinse and repeat).

Advice needs to be trusted, vendor agnostic and independent. Unfortunately conflicts of interest are rife in the technology industry. Sometimes these are obvious (its no surprise when your managed service partner only recommends a technology that they support) and sometime not so obvious (when advice is effected by secret commissions or just technical bias).

If you know of an organisation that is having its telecommunications contracts up for renewal in the next 12 months, considering the lifecycle replacement of network infrastructure, or is looking towards a digital business transformation agenda – then let them know that Beyond Technology can help.

Technical Debt

Posted on by Greg Spencer

Technical Debt was a phrase originally used in software development to describe the cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer. It has since become the common term to describe the same problem more broadly across the entire IT function.

Technical debt is often incurred through standard technology operations and projects through small decisions that seek to defer cost or effort and is largely invisible to the business until an appearingly small change in the business requirements causes an unexpected large project cost or delay.

It is considered best practice for organisations to maintain a technical debt register as well as have actively maintained lifecycle management plans for legacy systems and infrastructure, however this is not common.

Technology Lessons from 2020

Posted on by Greg Spencer


As the weather warms up across Australia, summer starts to remind us of simpler time in a pre-COVID era when we were only worried about the massive bushfires. Although some are still looking forward to life getting back to normal, within the technology industry we are keenly aware and familiar with the “new normal”. Most medical experts are agreed that the great hope of an effective COVID-19 vaccine is a multi-year process and that prudence and logistics mean it will be distributed slowly. While we hope a vaccine will provide a significant reduction in the risks posed by the virus, it will not be a panacea that eliminates COVID-19 from our lives overnight. So the many work place changes that have been facilitated by digital transformations and technologies will remain part of our world and people will not be falling straight back into old habits and practices.

As we focus on revising our technology strategies and roadmaps, it is useful to understand the lessons from the crisis and adjust our approach to support the future.

An Unplanned Environment

Most organisations had only considered the local implications of the “Pandemic Response” heading in their DR template and typically assumed they needed to cover only a short period. Although it seems obvious today, the idea that a pandemic by definition is global, and would last for an extended period was difficult to fully appreciate. Mandatory nationwide stay at home lockdowns, enforced quarantine, state boarder closures, international supply chain problems, curfews and even the concept of stopping international travel were difficult to consider in scenario planning prior to 2020 but will obviously feature heavily in the future.

Many carefully developed security plans and policies were not ready for the CEO to say “just open it up, we have no option other than make it work”. It is no real secret that tens of thousands of businesses all around Australia threw the rule book out the window to make things work during lockdown. The major concern is how few have effectively remediated those security holes since then. It often seems that the past lessons, such as from NAB have not been internalised well enough across all levels of IT departments. The Board and CEO “need to know” about cybersecurity issues and risks must be explicitly catalogued and reported. IT leaders also need to make sure that they are actively identifying and raising risks even when they don’t have a solution or the resources to comprehensively deal with them.

Information Security is rapidly becoming the number one avoidable cause of business ending events. Cyber-criminal syndicates have proved again how digitally agile they are with some very effective Ransomware as a Service with Profit Share (RWaaS-PS) campaigns targeting disgruntled and financially distressed workers with elevated security privileges given to avoid difficulties during work-from-home (WFH). This, along with the traditional “executive (CEO/CFO) authorised funds transfers” scam now using a combined forged email and deep-fake voice mail has been devastatingly effective in some areas during lockdown.


As the weather warms up across Australia, summer starts to remind us of simpler time in a pre-COVID era when we were only worried about the massive bushfires. Although some are still looking forward to life getting back to normal, within the technology industry we are keenly aware and familiar with the “new normal”. Most medical experts are agreed that the great hope of an effective COVID-19 vaccine is a multi-year process and that prudence and logistics mean it will be distributed slowly. While we hope a vaccine will provide a significant reduction in the risks posed by the virus, it will not be a panacea that eliminates COVID-19 from our lives overnight. So the many work place changes that have been facilitated by digital transformations and technologies will remain part of our world and people will not be falling straight back into old habits and practices.

As we focus on revising our technology strategies and roadmaps, it is useful to understand the lessons from the crisis and adjust our approach to support the future.

An Unplanned Environment

Most organisations had only considered the local implications of the “Pandemic Response” heading in their DR template and typically assumed they needed to cover only a short period. Although it seems obvious today, the idea that a pandemic by definition is global, and would last for an extended period was difficult to fully appreciate. Mandatory nationwide stay at home lockdowns, enforced quarantine, state boarder closures, international supply chain problems, curfews and even the concept of stopping international travel were difficult to consider in scenario planning prior to 2020 but will obviously feature heavily in the future.

Many carefully developed security plans and policies were not ready for the CEO to say “just open it up, we have no option other than make it work”. It is no real secret that tens of thousands of businesses all around Australia threw the rule book out the window to make things work during lockdown. The major concern is how few have effectively remediated those security holes since then. It often seems that the past lessons, such as from NAB have not been internalised well enough across all levels of IT departments. The Board and CEO “need to know” about cybersecurity issues and risks must be explicitly catalogued and reported. IT leaders also need to make sure that they are actively identifying and raising risks even when they don’t have a solution or the resources to comprehensively deal with them.

Information Security is rapidly becoming the number one avoidable cause of business ending events. Cyber-criminal syndicates have proved again how digitally agile they are with some very effective Ransomware as a Service with Profit Share (RWaaS-PS) campaigns targeting disgruntled and financially distressed workers with elevated security privileges given to avoid difficulties during work-from-home (WFH). This, along with the traditional “executive (CEO/CFO) authorised funds transfers” scam now using a combined forged email and deep-fake voice mail has been devastatingly effective in some areas during lockdown.

Sustainable Workplaces

We have also surprisingly noticed that users are much more adaptable that we previously gave them credit, whether it was the Queen having her first Zoom call, or Grandma having a telehealth consult with her GP and having a digital prescription filled.  Technology has been an enabler across the community and our users have never been more receptive to digital change. Legal departments that had provided nothing but problems with digital signature projects waved them through with encouraging comments, and “do nothing different Mary” from accounts became a digital champion explaining to others how to change video meeting virtual backgrounds.  Often the IT crew have developed a level of goodwill in the business for enablement that can be exploited to deliver permanent productivity gain. This unfortunately has often been in stark contrast to the lack of credibility that IT leadership has enjoyed within the broader executive team, as planning and capability failures have been multiplied by large expectation gaps. The crisis often proved how well IT can be reactive, but similarly proved in many cases how they lack effective pro-active management discipline and planning skills.

Some organization are formalizing a “work from anywhere” future, with others focused on returning to the office (RTO). We expect that especially for CBD-based knowledge workers, mandated office-based work will face strong headwinds, with workers demanding to maintain much of the flexibility afforded to them during the crisis. Our recommendation is that IT anticipate hybrid environments, with between 40 and 60% of hours worked from home becoming the norm in many organizations.

Although the move from office to WFH was hard, the move from WFH to the new normal hybrid WFH&O is more complex, as it need to deal with both environments in a permanent manner. While an incremental improvement in capability post-migration to WFH was acceptable, RTO needs to be fully functional on day 1. Similarly, where we cut corners to rapidly build capability for WFH due to everything being temporary and mandatory, these compromises are not acceptable when they are more permanent and not being externally forced. Where we may have got away with taking our office monitor home and balancing it on the ironing board as a temporary WFH solution, we cannot expect workers to carry equipment back and forward in a hybrid scenario. OH&S concerns might have been largely ignored during the health crisis due to the required rapid response but ironing board based workplace design won’t cut it any longer. During work from home, rostering or time and attendance systems were often not a focus but moving forward requires permanent solutions.

Anecdotal evidence on worker productivity during lockdown is very mixed; some reported significant gains driven by the use of commute hours for additional work, while others saw burnout issues caused by perceived 7*24 availability. Some organisations found that online meetings were more focussed while others reported that more detailed analysis was lost. IT leaders need to be cognisant that technology is the enabler of productivity and not the driver, partnering with the rest of the business to find out what is the priority and delivering that that should be the focus.

There is no doubt in my mind that the “free pass” afforded by users with regards to performance, functionality and reliability issues during the early stage of the crisis will evaporate completely, and we will be left with a permanent requirement to deliver appropriate service levels in a non-deterministic environment.

The Network is Everything

The undoubted hero of the crisis has been the Internet, fortuitously in the year that the NBN build “completed” and delivered an effective and usable broadband speed to the vast majority of metropolitan Australians, we have relied on home internet connections like never before. However, network engineering teams across the country are likely to exit the year with much less hair than they started it with, and with a number of learnings and adjusted priorities for the years ahead.

Carrier choice matters: While the rapid lock down and WFH transition was occurring, carriers saw network traffic patterns change enormously with peak evening demand and business hours peaks hitting record levels on a daily basis. One of the top four carriers decided that the appropriate response to the massive traffic growth was a network change embargo, cementing congestion and packet loss for the duration of the lockdown! Whether it is the internet into head office, mobile 4G/5G internet hotspots from your phone, or the NBN connection to the users home – the ability to compare bandwidth quality of a best-efforts service such as the internet is incredibly difficult but vitally important, and unfortunately price is often not a good measure of quality.

Consumer-grade is not business-grade; NBN upgrades and outages that were timed to avoid the Netflix peaks hit WFH users during their business day. Unplanned outages on consumer services can last 3 days, and consumer routers that fail over to 4G modems are not seamless, often causing an ongoing string of 5 minute outages as they fade in and out of service based around a very simplistic view of network availability. A deliberate effort by IT to design solutions for these issues proved highly effective for organisations that had the capability.

Traditional network SLA’s focused on MPLS grade networks are meaningless when staff are working from home. Many organisations were already transitioning towards SD-WAN or SASE architectures, however the crisis has prioritised and expedited the requirements for significant network transformation projects. Rather than relying on the crutch of supposably “reliable network links” we must architect solutions that provide the performance and reliability needed using best effort grade network links. This is possible, however it requires a diligent and informed planning approach to a significant network transformation program.

Resilient People

Organisations were often able to identify the critical IT resources during the early crisis response. When they saw that one or two IT staff seemed to be the centre of everything, they celebrated their dedication and heroics when 18-hour days were stacked end to end. However, we should examine our teams’ operational balance and knowledge distribution to identify resource choke points and single points of failure to plan for more sustainable and resilient operations in the future.

Training has never been so important – new processes and new technology requires new skills – and while team-based self-support models have often worked well through the crisis period, they have worked better when IT has effectively communicated and deliberately cascaded knowledge. We should be ensuring that we look at what worked, and what can be improved so that support models in the future can improve and embed new skills across the organisation. IT deskside support (physical presence) has been a reducing trend over recent years, however organisations that retained this capability to a limited degree were much better placed during the transition to WFH. The logistics of supporting an extensive work from home capability in a permanent form will require further consideration for many organisations. We recommend that HR be involved in these discussions to ensure technical and human requirements are balanced and expectations managed.

Future Vision

Some IT leaders and CIOs are taking the view that their “IT strategy is so well thought through that it doesn’t need to change” as its already focused on the flexibility and future architecture principles required. However this appears in most instances to be naïve; we believe it is fanciful to ignore the significant changes that have occurred in the business environment. Although it’s possible that the technology vision is still appropriate, the priority and velocity of the initiatives to get there will almost certainly have to be adjusted to support the business. Assumptions should be reviewed and priorities and velocity recast to deliver within the revised resource and capital envelope available. Whether due to the governments depreciation stimulus or simple business imperative, this may be an increased velocity of delivery for initiatives supporting cost savings or revenue generation.

Conclusion

2020 is the inflection year for many technology departments. Everyone should revisit strategy plans and many will need to rapidly review security risk and network transformation programs. Technology departments will be entering 2021 with a broader appreciation of the critical role they play.  IT successfully rising to the challenge of unexpected business requirements and changed expectations with considered strategic plans and deliberate responses will be a determining factor in their organisations’ overall success. It is simply not an option to wait and see what happens and unfortunately some technology leaders will not be able to meet this challenge. Technology disruption next year is unlikely to be any less than in 2020, however we can all work toward ensuring that it is more planned and deliberate.

Can adversity drive innovation?

Posted on by Greg Spencer


What has become clear in the last few days is that things that we had previously though was impossible, are actually happening. Who would have thought 10 days ago that Australia would shut down its international boarders and seek to significantly restrict movements between states. The new normal for the world is the basis for innovation – consider what you though you knew to be a fact, it is often just a constraint of thinking. But how does this affect technology planning and strategy?

When we look at the short term we are often finding that assumptions around response planning has been unable to predict the impacts of this crisis. Digital supply chains are failing and we are needing to revisit the assumptions made for our existing plans. Directions by IT for staff to go down to Officeworks to pick up a screen and keyboard for your new work from home environment are being replaced with come to the office and take your monitor home as staff report that the shelves are bare at suppliers. Hotspot your laptop to your work mobile has been replaced with order a NBN service as network congestions hits mobile networks. Record highs reported by telco’s for voice traffic is changing our assumption about the role voice services play in these scenarios.

In the medium term we need to understand how the new work practices are changing assumptions that we made about collaboration and collaborative systems. We are seeing that the requirements of systems that supported face to face meetings are quite different from those that replace face to face activity. Systems that provide effective video collaboration between two people are not the same as those that can support effective communication between 15 people. Slack, Webex, Teams and Zoom may have previously looked like they were all solving similar problems, are being proven to be different on a regular basis.

Where some cloud providers have been able to keep ahead of the growth curve, others have not. When your scenario planning has now fallen down on assumptions that have proved inaccurate, it is vital to quickly identify the problem, and make a decision to remediate. The challenge is to make sure that these decision are based on knowledge and fact, rather than pivoting away from a poorly performing service to a completely failing one. Independent and experienced advice is key.

In the longer term it is all about understanding and preparing for the pressure of the recovery. Every year we see the subtle lift in business spirits on the break of spring, but the up turn from this recovery will be enormous. The pressure to delivery solutions at speed will be greater than we have experienced before and a disproportionate amount of this load will fall on the shoulders of your IT systems, infrastructure and capability. Decision support systems, data analysis and visualisation tools and massive changes to global supply chains and work practices will drive monumental change in core business systems. Poor advice by technologist due to inexperience of conflicted interests will deliver project and system failure. This has always cost businesses disproportionately to the expected implementation costs – add pressure, short time frames and lack of understanding and knowledge and we can reasonably expect some monumental stuff ups. Planning is essential, IT excellence is by design, not by accident.

IT Challenges ahead in responding to Covid-19

Posted on by Greg Spencer

With the share market convinced Covid-19 is fake news one day, and that the world is ending the next, the constant change that we endure on a daily basis within technology is starting to look like stability. However as remote collaboration and communication technologies that we have been deploying into the business for years start to get a real workout, a few questions have started to emerge:

A) Will the telco infrastructure hold up? 

NBN is forecasting 70% increased traffic peaks during business hours, and a 40% increased peak traffic in the evenings. The former due to work from home traffic with a much more significant increase in upload traffic, and the later due to increase social isolation driving more Netflix and other video streaming and gaming platforms.

Firstly the good news, the 70% increase in peak traffic during business hours is not expected to exceed the current evening peaks. However due to the significantly different traffic profile of synchronous business traffic, we can expect some performance impacts due to the limited upload capacity in the network. The news is perhaps not so good for those trying to watch 4 separate UHD screens between 8 and 11pm where we can probably expect some avalanche congestion. These impacts of course will get significantly worse if/when the schools close and 3 million kids start streaming and remote learning on the network.

The less good news, many households have yet to make the transition to NBN and will be relying on hotspots from their mobile phone. As some mobile networks are already struggling with the existing growth requirements for their network backhaul, we already know that this will cause problems in some areas for some networks. The only solution for this is to make sure that staff have access to a wireline solution from home as quickly as possible. Our advice to organisations is to start at the most important staff, and audit their home access through a staff survey and identify where you have problems – a NBN install may take a couple of weeks, but it is important to remember this crisis is only just beginning and the prime minister is already suggesting that impacts will be continued to be felt for the next 6 months.

B) What are our OH&S responsibilities when we direct staff to work from home? 

I am not going to attempt to answer this one myself, but perhaps some of my LinkedIn contacts that are experts in this area may provide some thoughts. I will however provide insights into what I have seen a few organisations recently do to mitigate potential concerns. One company has been quite specific in their instruction to work from home with directions such as “If you are able to work from home…”, while others have directed staff to purchase required equipment (Chairs, monitors, keyboards etc) to support there work from home requirements.

C) Has the Cyber threat matrix increased with the larger volume of remote access activity?

Well, quite simply YES. Unfortunately the Cyber thugs are all soldering on and there is evidence that they are ramping up phishing activity to take advantage of the disruption. Many IT organisations are cutting security corners to enable improved remote access throughput as many had not previously envisaged such a large cohort of staff working from home.  Conditional Multi-factor authentication (for example) should be enabled on all remote working capabilities, and the cyber gangs are looking to exploit those that have not.  At the very least the capabilities of your IT function to monitor the security event logs when remote access usage has significantly increased – while also dealing with the other pressures that we are putting on them, is likely far from ideal.


The IT function of all Australian organisations will be tested in the coming months, Beyond Technology is ideally positioned as Australia’s leading independent mid-tier IT management consultants to assist with IT review and strategic planning to ensure that you have certainty about your organisations ability to respond.

Pandemic Planning

Posted on by Greg Spencer

With the general public seeming to be panic buying toilet paper and hand sanitiser many of our clients have been asking what should IT be doing to prepare. Although formal pandemic planning is quite an involved process, understanding your IT capabilities and governance processes is key to making sure that you are able to respond if required. With local authorities now predicting that peak risk of major disruption will be in August, we have come up with our top 5 questions that IT needs to be able to answer today.

They are:

  1. What percentage of your workforce would be able to simultaneously work from home with the existing remote access capacity? How many workers know how without instruction from IT?
  2. Has the technical architecture of your remote working systems been designed to provide the level of reliability required to support critical business tasks, or has it been design with a best efforts approach as you could “always drive into the office if it was important”?
  3. What IT capabilities are single man sensitive – does documentation exist to cover the recovery of failed key systems while key IT staff are on unexpected medical leave? Are security protocols robust enough to support mass remote working when key decision makers may be unavailable?
  4. What 3rd party suppliers or services are you critically reliant upon, and do they have a pandemic response plan in place? How easily is your off-site backup process disrupted?
  5. Is your IT support capability able to provide the required levels of service when a significant proportion of the workforce are not in the office? How many times are technical problems solved with a quick drop in to the IT guys desk?

Often these questions have answers that can surprise, and with the continuity of critical systems and IT services vital to the ongoing operation of any business we are finding many CEO’s are seeking to undertake an independent IT assessment to provide assurance that they are able to rely on those capabilities during an unexpected disruption. Fully understanding your existing capabilities and limitations, as well as reviewing your technical governance processes seems like a small step, however it can significantly improve an organisations ability to respond quickly and effectively to rapidly changing circumstances.

Top ten for 2020 and BEYOND

Posted on by Greg Spencer

I wish you and your family happy holidays on behalf of the entire Beyond Technology team. Thank you for your continued support and I hope that the challenges ahead in 2020 bring you success and exciting opportunities.

With the start of a new decade comes an opportunity to think about what the twenties will bring. Many may point to climate change and increasing political uncertainty, however as a Technologist I have increasingly been thinking of the years ahead in terms of prioritization. Opportunities for technology to truly transform thinking, markets, and your business are endless – but our ability to consume and manage the required change is the challenge we face. In thinking of the year ahead, the BTC Team has identified key trends and challenges that we feel our clients will be facing next year. As independent IT management consultants, we not only see a variety of different industries suffering the same issues, but it’s our job to help you identify and form the solutions. Please feel free to contact me at any time to discuss how Beyond Technology can help your organisation.

  1. Deciding what not to do – Focus and prioritisation is undoubtedly the theme for 2020, with a planning focus of what needs to be done first to support the initiatives of the future. If your organisations executive is yet to review or understand what your IT Strategy means for the business, then now is the time to act.
  2. Network Planning 2020 style – With the NBN build completing and the fibre wars largely ending the vision for the new corporate network is clear and its new capabilities are beginning to be assumed within strategy plans. Gigabit to the branch with carrier diversity being standard, SD-WAN is combining with uCPE to make virtual network functions deployable. This along with next generation security requirements and WiFi 6 (802.11ax) has the potential to create the perfect storm for network infrastructure upgrades that will drive large CAPEX requirements if not planned appropriately.
  3. Ongoing focus on IT governance – Just ask the now Ex-Chairman and Ex-CEO of Westpac on the importance of IT Governance. The focus on Technology strategy and execution has never been higher, boards have continued to ask questions of organisations executive team on IT strategy, risk management and benefits realisation which has spurred on the deployment of more formal IT governance frameworks. Independent external advisers to boards and steering committees have become common place and IT governance frameworks based on the ISO/IEC 38500:2008(E) are the norm.
  4. Digital transformations – IDC reports that 85% of CEO’s believe they have only 24 months to execute their digital transformation before its too late. Second and third order digital disruption is generally focused on an embedded digital engagement capability, with organisations seeking more involvement of IT in defining the business needs. Boards and CEO’s continue to move away from the focus on the defensive play to instead seek out digital engagement and transformational opportunities.
  5. Security as an Immune system – With commercially motivated cyber attacks becoming increasingly commonplace we continue to evolve our defensive security posture. As always the trade-off between high security and high functionality continues to be a fine balance, however we need to embed security responses into the core of our environment. We have the conclusion that healthy living through isolation is not feasible and our systems need an immune system that can respond to the inevitable breach.
  6. User Experience Instrumentation – Technology is now clearly expected to monitor and remediate the user experience rather than focus on the technology that provides it. UX instrumentation will increasingly provide the required insights that keeps the technology department on the front foot.
  7. IoT (Internet of Things) use-cases evolve – With 1.3 billion services in use worldwide at the end of 2019 and Cat-M1 & NB-IOT carrier networks being available nationwide for a few cents a day, use-cases are continuing to evolve and we are starting to see the growing management overhead that this is bringing. New security obligations are being considered by the federal department of Home Affairs which will likely also add pressure to ensure that appropriate management automation is deployed from day 1.
  8. LowCode/NoCode Development initiatives spread – with digital initiatives seeking to exploit competitive advantages of from organisations system capabilities we are seeing more and more businesses considering bespoke development as part of their technology strategy. With offshore development team results often leading to disappointment, the LowCode/NoCode approach provides an attractive proposition.
  9. Increased penetration of integration platforms – The continued preference for replacing monolithic systems with an integrated best of breed approach has set the scene for a simplified approach to stitching systems together. Different circumstances require different approaches however the age of bespoke point to point integration patterns has definitely past.
  10. Further increased board-level oversight of IT operations – The importance of secure, reliable and efficient IT to support the competitiveness of businesses will continue to be a focal point for many boards. Data custody has become an increasing concern as increasingly complex supply chain and IT environments threaten to affect the “line of sight” of organisations to its information. Boards will continue to ask questions on their risk levels for data integrity, information protection and privacy compliance. We expect many more organisations will opt for Independent external review to provide appropriate oversight directly to the board.

Organisations that are not deliberately planning their technology strategy will not be able to prioritise the avalanche of opportunity that they face today. To take advantage of transformation and digital innovation opportunities CEO’s must have confidence in their Technology capabilities. Those that don’t, must act now before being left with an uncompetitive legacy cost base and be in the dark compared to others that will be leveraging digital insights to exploit market opportunities.

Top 10 for 2019 and BEYOND

Posted on by Greg Spencer


I wish you and your family happy holidays on behalf of the entire Beyond Technology team. Thank you for your continued support and I hope that the challenges ahead in 2019 bring you success and exciting opportunities. In thinking of the year ahead, I thought that I would share with you what the BTC Team has identified as the key trends and challenges that we feel our clients will be facing next year. As independent IT management consultants, we not only see a variety of different industries suffering the same issues, but it’s our job to help you identify and form the solutions. Please feel free to contact me at any time to discuss how Beyond Technology can help your organisation.

  1. Compliance cost focus – After a year where the Australian Privacy Principles were cemented into the consideration of many boards and the true cost of compliance to the requirements of the GDPR out of the EU became understood to those with clients or operations in Europe, many have predicted that our local compliance burden will soon mirror that of Europe. Armed with this prediction and observing the challenges in the EU we expect that a more mature approach to compliance will be formed in 2019 that seeks to avoid additional compliance costs by baking the consideration of privacy directly into the business processes and technology solutions. Those organisations that have taken this approach have successfully demonstrated an improved responsiveness of technology to the business and a reduced compliance cost.
  2. Less “Geeks” in the office  – The importance of technology engaging with the business and aligning its priorities has never been higher, and with the ongoing simplifications efforts there are less a less technicians required to keep the light on. Technology departments will increasingly focus on IT business analysis skills and engage more directly with efforts to assist users to get more productivity from technology investments.
  3. Ongoing focus on IT governance – The importance of technology strategy and execution has never been higher, boards have continued to ask questions of organisations executive team on IT strategy, risk management and benefits realisation which has spurred on the deployment of more formal IT governance frameworks. Independent external advisors to boards and steering committees have become common place and IT governance frameworks based on the ISO/IEC 38500:2008(E) are the norm.
  4. Digital Engagement transformations – As second order digital disruption became common place over the last few year the organisations response continues to seek more involvement of IT in defining the business needs. Boards and CEO’s continue to move away from the focus on the defensive play to instead seek out digital engagement and transformational opportunities.
  5. Decline in MPLS networks – With carrier diversity increasingly considered the best approach to business resilience the deployment of MPLS based networks is expected to see an acceleration in its decline.  With Hybrid Network and Internet based SD-WAN quickly maturing the use-case for MPLS networks will become increasingly rare.
  6. Initial 5G deployments – With the battle lines drawn and the major telco’s all seeking new opportunities for better margins I expect to see the rollout of 5G technology this year primarily in the fixed line broadband replacement space. Although this will only be with Mid-band spectrum, the use of pole-top densification will ready the networks for mmWave deployment in the future.
  7. IoT (Internet of Things) – With Cat-M1 and NB-IOT carrier networks being available nationwide at around 10 cents a day, new use-cases will develop and we can start to expect all new field assets to come standard with centralised telemetric capabilities.
  8. NBN Matures and 10G becomes mainstream – with the mainline NBN rollout due to complete in the next 24 months and a likely change of the federal government providing some blame shifting opportunities we expect to see the NBN offering mature significantly. With FTTC set to be the upgrade path for FTTN and with the completion of the HFC rollout we expect to see 1G consumer connections become feasible. Similarly with telco’s around the world starting to work with the retail equation of “double the price for five or ten time the bandwidth” and the market increasingly being able to distinguish between congested and contented bandwidth, we think that commercial users will increasingly deploy 10G connections.
  9. Further increased board-level oversight of IT operations – The importance of secure, reliable and efficient IT to support the competitiveness of businesses will be a focal point for many boards. Data custody has become an increasing concern as increasingly complex supply chain and IT environments threaten to affect the “line of sight” of organisations to its information. Boards will continue to ask questions on their risk levels for data integrity, information protection and privacy compliance. We expect many more organisations will opt for Independent external review to provide appropriate oversight directly to the board.
  10. Security as an Immune system – With cyber criminal gangs proving to be the most digitally agile organisations on the planet we continue to evolve our defensive security posture. As always the trade-off between high security and high functionality continues to be a fine balance, however new approaches seek to embed security responses into the core of our environment. We have reached the conclusion that healthy living through isolation is not feasible and our systems need an immune system that can respond to the inevitable breach.

Organisations that are waiting to be digitally disrupted will simply not survive into the future. To take advantage of digital innovation and transformation opportunities CEO’s must have confidence in their Technology capabilities. Those that don’t have this confidence must act quickly before being left with a legacy cost base leaving them uncompetitive and be in the dark compared to others that will be leveraging digital innovation to exploit market opportunities.