We were lucky enough to attend the Australian-Israel Chamber of Commerce last major business lunch of the year on Tuesday, discussing ‘Vision for Innovation Online: Making your business relevant’.
With such an interesting and thought-provoking topic, the AICC ensured that the conversation was led by an incredibly experienced panel of key Australian business leaders. We’ve put together some of the highlights from the conversation with William Easton Director of Facebook Australia & New Zealand, Karen Ganschow General Manager for Customer Relationship Marketing and Digital for Westpac Group and Cliff Rosenberg Australian and South East Asia Managing Director of LinkedIn.
The expert panel took to the stage at the Four Seasons Hotel in Sydney on Tuesday, to share their insider knowledge and learnings from big data and how best to use it, to the use of social media and online to benefit business and customers. Key business principles were also discussed to assist businesses in creating an innovative and productive workplace.
All three companies involved in the discussion agreed that utilising big data was an integral part of business innovation, as long as it is used effectively. The three speakers concluded that businesses who have the opportunity to access big data, don’t necessarily benefit from it, unless they can make the investment to turn those numbers into insights.
“The reality is that big data has absolutely no value unless you can build insights. And insights have no value unless you can distribute those insights in the right format to the right people… to make the right business decisions to ultimately drive efficiencies and profit and loss sales.”, William Easton said.
Westpac’s Karen Ganschow, agreed that big data is about constant iteration and that it is important to get the insight quickly across to the people who can action it. Getting this information to the frontline is quite achievable when you factor in that big data can now be turned over in a matter of days.
When discussing how businesses can use new online tools, the speakers collectively agreed that you have to allow for failure and accept that if you are too push boundaries, you’re not going to get everything right. Cliff Rosenberg, noted that every professional should be in constant Beta mode, constantly re-inventing and re-evaluating themselves and situations in order to drive innovation.
Easton remarked that companies need to embrace failure and that businesses who were getting it 100% right are probably just doing what everyone else is doing whereas Facebook would be happy if they got 50% of it right.