Wrays were pleased to sponsor this year’s Chief Strategy Officer Summit on Tuesday 6 and Wednesday 7 September at the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney. The Summit explored the latest strategic trends, challenges and process within the corporate nexus.
The summit’s program allowed executives to hear how leading organisations evolve, ensuring objectives are consistently achieved in this ever changing environment.
Key highlights of the presentations included:
- BT Financial Chief Operations Officer, Andrew Walker who spoke about the expectations that have been set by organisations like Airbnb and Uber which are built all around the customer experience and that no matter industry you play in, your customer needs to be the pivotal focus or you’ll be left behind.
- GE Chief Commercial Officer, Mark Sheppard spoke about data and that in ASX 100 industrial based organisations they are only using half of one precent of the data collected – they’re drowning in data but not leveraging it.
- Virgin Australia General Manager Strategy & Innovation, Royston Lim talked about customer journey maps and using data to determine each customer touch point – then drilling down to understand each touch point and then innovating to create a better end to end customer.
- Amazon Web Services Head of Enterprise Strategy, Jonathan Kaehne shared the innovation process at Amazon and how their process for new ideas is built around keeping the customer in the conversation the whole time and the constant use of data.
We hosted a private lunch as part of the program on Tuesday with a selection of thought leaders from Virgin Australia, Woolworths Ltd, Twitter, Ergon Energy and News Corp Australia in attendance.
We were joined by Thomas Thurston, Managing Director of WR Hambrecht Ventures (a San Francisco based early stage VC fund) and founder of Growth Science (a data science firm providing prescriptive analytics for corporate growth portfolios), who spoke about the power of data science and using it to stay ahead of the disruption curve. Jonathon Wolfe, Director of Wrays Solutions also spoke and introduced Wrays’ latest offering, GrowSmart – the intelligent approach to strategic innovation.