News
Building Business Support and Learning to Fail: Placing People at the Heart of Digital Transformation
June 26, 2024 | IN Insider Insights, Media Release and News | BY AVID | 8 min read
Since the dawn of the internet era some four decades ago, every sector has needed to evolve in line with the new opportunities and challenges presented.
The digital transformation of business has irrevocably impacted the way we strategise, create, and communicate. It has allowed for operational optimisation and increased efficiency and responsiveness; however, it has also created commercial and security risks like never before.
In the property sector, technological innovation has increasingly become a cornerstone of business strategy, rather than a distinct and disparate function.
As a top-10 residential developer, AVID Property Group’s (AVID) customer-driven digital leadership means future-proofing the business, positioning it for sustained growth and innovating in an ever-evolving marketplace.
It is our steadfast belief that staying committed to our customer-centric ethos and placing current and new residents – alongside our staff – at the very heart of our digital transformation has been central to our success in this area and will be a key driver of our future vision of business growth and diversification.
In the past two years, AVID’s digital investment has intensified, with a redesigned enterprise architecture, move to the cloud, and a strategic shift in the way the business leverages its digital tools to enhance processes, improve data management and drive innovation.
Gaining support for the transformation
Although a mid-size business by definition, it was critical for AVID to undergo a digital transformation to evolve the business to ensure it could implement its long-term growth and acquisition strategy. It was vital for our success that we could keep as a business in the new ‘on demand, always on’ world. This, in essence, meant streamlining and simplifying systems and processes to get the business – from the point of sale all the way through to the board room – to a modernised operating environment.
One of the greatest challenges we faced was steering the ‘metaphorical ship’ from old business practice to a ‘future ready’ state where we could compete against our larger competitors. We had to be heard and gain support from all levels on the business, at every stage in the journey, to ensure the success of transformation.
Naturally, going into this journey we understood that no one genuinely enjoys substantial change in the workplace – some respond better than others but ultimately, most people would agree it is generally an inconvenience. Our role was to ensure this process happened efficiently and with minimal disruption.
Understanding this, we took a people change management informed approach rather than a technical change approach when communicating about the digital transformation journey AVID was undertaking with staff.
One of the ways we did this was by being considered in how and when we communicated to staff. Internally, we never referred to this work as the ‘digital transformation’ but rather we referred to critical changes as new initiatives.
We quickly learned that a series of minor changes over two years were much more palatable than one or two significant changes at once. We monitored staff sentiment during this time, if the broader team were not responding well to a change we would press pause, let the dust settle and resolve any issues before pushing forward again.
Taking a people first approach, rather than a technical approach to change helped us to better implement changes and gain internal support to enable a successful digital transformation.
Learning to fail
One of the critical elements of AVID’s digital transformation was moving all servers to the cloud. The hard truth of this process for us was knowing that 83 per cent of all data migration projects fail – so as a small team, with a small budget, the odds were stacked against us.
In our industry it’s very rare to have permission to fail – a failure in the property and construction industry can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line or months of delays.
In order to succeed, however, we knew we needed to have a highly engaged and highly skilled technical team who felt they had a voice in the decisions being made. It was also vital there was no fear of failure – we knew we needed to give ourselves the flexibility and permission to experiment as the business went through the digital transformation process.
To support the highly skilled internal technical team, AVID also partnered with experts in their field to undertake this work and it had to trust that everyone was acting in the best interest of the business – which ultimately, they were and still are today.
Fostering customer trust and transparency
In a world of uncertainty – and in a sector like property and construction which has experienced challenging times – genuine trust is one of the greatest currencies a business can hold with its customers.
How that intersects with a customer’s digital experience is increasingly important. Digital must support customer understanding, engagement, and transparency, fostering their trust in the business.
To this end, AVID has invested heavily in our AVIDConnect service to empower customers to self-serve and track the progress of their product development through each phase of the project.
According to recent ABS data, first home buyers are increasingly coming back to the market with the volume of new loan commitments by this group rising 13.2 per cent in the year to February 20241, while the value of loans increased 20.7 per cent in the same period.
The emotional and financial commitment of a new home is immense, and for those embarking on the process for the first time especially, there can be a sense of trepidation.
AVIDConnect was developed with this in mind and is supported by a series of digital and personal touch points including live key build dates and civil construction milestones, key documentation and plans, a personal gallery, enquiry status tracking, and access to our knowledge Hub as well as regional information and community events.
As a sector, educating buyers and providing knowledge and support through the entire process of their buying, building, and moving journey should be the standard we all aim to meet.
Boosting cyber security
As an extension of building trust, embedding a cyber safe culture through mature capability, change management and stakeholder engagement is critical to AVID’s digital transformation.
It’s become apparent in recent years that no sector or business is immune to cyber risk, and the property and construction sector needs to ramp up protection for the sake of our customers, as well as our businesses, employees, and stakeholders.
The reputational damage to organisations during and following a cyber-attack or data breach can be devastating and long-lasting, and the impacts on affected customers can last for years.
AVID’s reformed and award-winning approach to cybersecurity has been a critical component of our digital transformation, providing enhanced security, mitigating potential risks, and strengthening its ability to protect sensitive data.
By enveloping our cyber strategy and roadmap with our digital transformation and overall business strategy we have driven significant change in the maturing of the environment through incremental steps, capitalising on the learning of others and ensuring staff are consistently evolving their knowledge.
AI – the next frontier is already here
Having rapidly gained momentum as the new frontier of business innovation, artificial intelligence (AI) is set to change the face of technological innovation.
For any business seeking to optimise the use of AI, it is, once again, imperative to keep the customer central to any advancements – particularly in terms of collecting and analysing AI-collected data to drive decision-making.
At AVID, our early integration of enhanced data quality, analytics and AI has been led by our building of a leading data platform to boost data management capabilities and the agile integration of various applications, databases, and processes. This has empowered the business with fast, proactive real time insights for improved decision-making, identification of emerging trends and responsiveness to seize new opportunities.
Automation has also been introduced, enabling employees to focus on more strategic and creative aspects of their roles.
As a core component of our future digital transformation, the key for AVID will be translating these capabilities into more customer-aligned, responsive products and services that meet the specific needs of the home buyers of the future.
Helen Comninos, AVID Property Group General Manager Business Operations
Managing Information Technology functions and leading the implementation of business and technology enabled projects, Helen is focused on improving efficiency among processes and systems, while managing risk. With more than 25 years’ experience growing businesses across Australia and South Africa, she has worked across a variety of industries including finance, technology, insurance, property, media, and government.
1 Australian Bureau of Statistics (April 2024) Lending indicators, February 2024, ABS Website, accessed 18 April 2024.