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‘Digital Queensland’ builds business capability
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IMAGINE a website and communication system business leaders could turn to for answers and potential solutions to their business challenges. A place where business leaders could find best-of-breed technologies and services – all determined by peer research – to connect with locally.
That is just the start for the Brisbane-based Digital Business insights organisation, which has developed such a digital platform based on 14 years of Australia-wide business research.
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DIGITAL Business insights (DBi) has established a unique web portal designed to help build business capability throughout the state’s small and medium enterprise (SME) sector – although larger companies, government and not-for-profit organisations will also benefit.
DigitalQld.com.au is live and testing the reaction of business leaders to what is a unique Australian-developed approach to helping SMEs deal with, and benefit from, the digital revolution. Business Acumen is a contributing partner to the project and has been following its development over the past six of its 14 years gestation period.
What underpins the power of DigitalQld.com.au is the body of research that is behind it – almost 60,000 detailed surveys of business leaders from industries across the spectrum. Added to that are more than 500 detailed case studies and a string of economic development projects across Australia conducted by DBi.
The technology platform that enables this research includes state-of-the-art learning management and information delivery systems that will all come live over the next 12 months.
DBi CEO John Sheridan said DigitalQld.com.au is a broad example of what can be delivered to an industry, or a region, to help businesses use the digital revolution to their advantage. DBi decided, off its own bat, that the time was ripe to showcase the platform in an introductory way for the company’s home state.
“What is Digital Queensland? It’s a repository for much of the work we have done over the past three years, working on projects in Melbourne, ACT, WA, Queensland and elsewhere,” Mr Sheridan said. “And the site is configurable, so we can tailor the content to match the economic development focus of a region.”
“During each project, we surveyed businesses and not-for-profits asking them about their use of ICT products and services. Survey respondents were asked to rate the products and services they used, as well as their sources of help, information and advice.
“The results gave us insights into what organisations are doing, where they are succeeding or floundering and where they go for help and advice.
“Based on this evidence and demand mapping we created a program of workshops, supported by case studies and reports designed to help organisations make better-informed decisions.”
The outcomes from the workshops were powerful, with attending businesses gaining great insights and, in many cases, finding local solutions and services were available. The sponsoring local councils and development organisations discovered a great deal about their local business environments.
“The two-hour workshops were delivered by systems integrators, web services, voice services and software developers – four at a time, all identified in the surveys and all rated highly by customers,” Mr Sheridan said. “The workshop programs were rolled out in various locations and individual 15-minute workshop presentations were videoed for further use.”
Many of these videos were so useful that DBi decided to use its research to frame a list of business challenges and then record presentations from those best-of-breed businesses identified as most capable of explaining the problems and the potential solutions.
“As a result we have gathered more than 120 15-minute video presentations covering a wide range of subjects,” Mr Sheridan said.
“Where there were gaps in the subjects covered, we identified new ‘best of breed’ solutions from the research and then shot more videos.
“We also added case studies, observations and insights on ICT through a blog, and included video magazine presentations on broader issues of interest to all.”
Mr Sheridan said, piece by piece, an extremely valuable resource has been gathered with contributions from many leading solution providers across Australia, “an expanding and growing encyclopaedia of information on ICT use, software solutions and more”.
Mr Sheridan said a tailored sample of that material has been assembled on the Digital Queensland website.
“It is a living resource, evolving and responsive, evidence based and selective, relevant and useful,” he said. “The platform also includes training material delivered through a learning management system and social media for communities of interest.
“The opportunity is to now customise and configure the platform for regions and sectors, with the resources focused totally on local needs.”
DBi plans for each regional platform to be unique but also connected to every other regional platform, as many regional issues were common and shared with other regions.
“The interconnected framework then provides a forum, a network and an opportunity for ongoing informed sharing and discussion with other communities anywhere in Australia,” Mr Sheridan said.
“In the current post GFC financial climate, everybody is struggling with ‘how to do more with less’. And more consideration is being given to collaboration and sharing, as decision makers realise it is not necessary to separately reinvent the wheel, again and again.
“In an interconnected framework, limited resources, ideas and innovations can be distributed, leveraged, discussed and added to.
“New value and understanding can be shared and we can avoid continually ‘starting from scratch’ with every new project.”
Mr Sheridan said DBi understood what the power of digital connectivity potentially represented for communities, “but so far all we have seen in Australia is multiple individual websites, with many links but no interconnectivity”.
“Doing you own thing is important. But doing the region’s and the nation’s thing is even more important if we are going to build local, sustainable and robust communities across Australia, not just in the cities, but in the regions and rural areas as well,” Mr Sheridan said.
“Communities where new ideas can be trialled, tested and shared swiftly – communities where collaboration can be encouraged and supported locally and across the nation – communities where we can leverage our collective resources wisely to make us more competitive on the world stage.”
He explained the unique role the collaborative DBi system could play in building better businesses right across Australia and across all sectors.
DBi’s platforms played to Australia’s advantages of “agility and intelligence and our teamwork”.
“Because of our ability to work together for shared goals, as well as work independently towards individual objectives,” Mr Sheridan said.
“With a digital framework and a digital foundation we can do both at the same time. And that is what a competitive digital economy is all about.”
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