Growth Through Transformation, Innovation, Agility, and Resilience

Miriam McLemore:
I am thrilled today to have Simon with us to share a little bit of his background. Simon, could you give us a brief introduction?

Simon Noonan:
Yes, my name is Simon Noonan. I'm the CIO of Sportsbet. I've been at Sportsbet now for six years. Prior to Sportsbet, I had spent about 13 years in banking, which was very different to the Sportsbet world. And then, prior to Sportsbet – prior to the banking world – I was in consulting and at few startups in the early 2000s. So, I've been in technology and the digital space for just over 20 years now.

Miriam McLemore:
And so, you drove a transformation journey and a move to Cloud for your organization. Can you share a little bit about that journey?

Simon Noonan:
Yeah, sure. So, Sportsbet (you know just for a bit a background on Sportsbet) we're a digital company, so we offer bidding services to Australian customers online via websites and via app experience. So, we're very much digital natives. That's where we start; however, we're not cloud natives, so we've got two data centers today which have been serving our customers the content that they have to bet with us.

About three years ago, we came up with a cloud strategy around moving – we had a vision around moving what we did in data centers to the cloud.

And with that cloud strategy, we were able to articulate in business-speak, what it meant for the business to move from the data centers to the cloud. And there were about four key elements there. 

One was around, think about innovation, how do we innovate? So, for us that means, how do we you know, invent new products and how do we test those products with customers, really rapidly?

Secondly, we thought about how do we create agility in our organization, so we can do things differently, we can do things fast, we can automate things. So we're doing, we're spending time on the right things, rather than the wrong things. 

Then we thought about resilience. So as part of being an online business, having business-critical workloads in the cloud, we knew that we needed to have resilience in our platforms. And our platforms, on a typical day, you know, a typical day has got 300 days a year, which is normal workloads. But there's about five days a year where the scale is to about 10x or 15x, so we needed a scale.

Miriam McLemore:
We can appreciate that at Amazon.

Simon Noonan:
So, and then we think about following with costs. We didn't lead with costs, we led with innovation and agility, then thinking about resilience, then through to costs. And I think that, from an organizational point of view, allowed people to really realize that actually, yes, cost is a good outcome, because paying as you go is helpful. And having transparency of costs, is great. And it really empowers our teams to understand where we're spending our money, but organizationally, we thought about how do we grow, and how to we continue to grow? It was all about the growth story and the investment story. That was really how we pitched the cloud strategy and the cloud transformation to our business. 

Miriam McLemore:
It sounds like, from the very beginning, you had the other C-suite involvement in this journey.

Simon Noonan:
Yeah.

Miriam McLemore:
How did that come about?

Simon Noonan:
We spent time, time really articulating our vision. So, we didn't start with cloud, what we started with was the Sportsbet strategy, what is the vision for Sportsbet? And, Sportsbet's got a really strong strategy around where we want to be this year vs. next year vs. two or three years time. And, underpinning that, I created a technology strategy, which linked really nicely back to the Sportsbet strategy. And, underpinning the technology strategy, was an element called the cloud strategy. 

And within our technology strategy there's four pillars, we've got our platform that is our advantage, and within that pillar is cloud, it is our data platforms, it is our front-end platforms, it's our services platforms. So, that's really about how we create platforms to the future and make our platforms a part of our competitive advantage here at Sportsbet.

Another pillar is around having brilliant customer experiences. So, we think about how do we have vast experiences for our customers, which are easy, intuitive, and ultimately give them personalized experience? So that was the second pillar.

The third pillar then we thought about was how do we get stuff done, and that's sort of our language. "How do we get stuff done?" It wasn't, you know, we could have gone for more corporate speak but this is more sort of natural, Sportsbet speak. And that's about agile and devops and creating an environment of learning and a culture of learning.

And then finally we had the fourth pillar, which was around the tools of the trade, which was how do give our staff, our people, the right tools to be effective in their role. So, we had this Sportsbet Strategy, we had the Technology Strategy, the underpinning that Cloud Strategy was one of the elements within the Platform Pillar of the Cloud strategy – of the Platform Strategy.

Miriam McLemore:
That's fantastic. So if you sat down and had a coffee with your CEO, how do you think he would describe the journey and the benefits of cloud in this transformation?

Simon Noonan:
Well, it's still pretty early, it's still really early. And I say really early in the sense that we'll be 100% in the cloud by end of this year.

Miriam McLemore:
Oh, wow, that's pretty fast.

Simon Noonan:
Pretty fast, yes, it's taken us from, you know, inception through to  completion, it took two and half, nearly three years. I'd say two years of heavy lifting. And during that time, I think Barni – my boss – would say that "you've reshaped the organization," you know, "the technology organization."

No longer are we thinking about how many boxes we buy and how we put the wires in the boxes and make that available for our delivery teams. You've actually, you've empowered your teams to do things faster, smarter, more effectively. They can then get the end product to the customer in a more efficient way.

Miriam McLemore:
That's wonderful. Another key partner, at least I've found, in my conversations with customers, is the CFO and getting that funding model right.

Can you share a little bit about your partnership with the CFO?

Simon Noonan:
It would, we've been pretty lucky, it's again, being a digital native business, the CFO, he's been on the journey when we started linking the Sportsbet strategy to the tech strategy to what's happening in the cloud, so he understood that early.

But, one of the things we did, across the organization, we realized that people change, was fundamental. And, as a part of that, we took all executives through a two-day cloud course. We sort of were net badged into the Cloud Academy. The Cloud Academy is two streams, a non-technical stream and a technical stream.

The non-technical stream is where we took the executives through to really understand the language of cloud, what does it mean to be in the cloud, because when I first started talking about the cloud I sort of could sort of see in people's eyes they thought about iCloud and those things.

It wasn't the cloud as we know it today with the Amazon experience.

So, spending time with the executives and with the CFO, Nathan, articulating what the Cloud means, and for non-technical folk, giving them the skills and experience to have the right conversations internally, so went through HR, finance, operations, our marketing teams.

Everyone got the opportunity to go stream the Cloud Academy. It’s still alive today. You know, three years later, we still got the Cloud Academy going strong. It's now more oriented towards the technical skills, be it architecture, security, design, and how we implement the Cloud within Sportsbet.

But, it's still alive and well and I think that was fundamentally about getting people on the same page around how do we change our language and how do we do this together? This is not sovereign vs. anyone else, it's actually, it's about alignment and doing things together as a team.

Miriam McLemore:
Wow, Simon, thank you so much. What a wonderful story, thank you for being here.

Simon Noonan:
No worries, thank you.