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CIO50 2021 #14: Peter Fletcher-Dobson, BCITO

  • Name Peter Fletcher-Dobson
  • Title Chief Digital Officer
  • Company BCITO
  • Commenced role August 2019
  • Reporting Line CEO
  • Member of the Executive Team Yes
  • Technology Function 30 staff, four direct reports
  • BCITO (Building Construction Industry Training Organisation) has supplied 30,000 fully-qualified apprentices to the construction industry and currently has 21,000 apprentices training under 9,000 employers. It has serviced both apprentices and employers using a service model relying on a box of training books for learners, site visits, paper-based contracts, and manual report writing. Following Government post-Covid investment in construction training new apprentice numbers doubled placing enormous stress on this physical-engagement only model. BCITO is now part of Te Pūkenga, New Zealand’s largest tertiary education provider.

    Two years ago the Digital Group was formed to digitise the operating model, under the leadership of chief digital officer Peter Fletcher-Dobson, a strategy was put in place to deliver data stabilisation, business efficiencies and customer value.

    Data Stabilisation

    The organisation was running two CRM systems, one of which had duplicated data exponentially. Over 18 months the team cleaned up the data and decommissioned the legacy CRM. This saved $500,000 per annum in licence and maintenance fees and created one source of the truth.

    Business Efficiencies

    The digital group digitised training contracts, which reduced processing time from 15-20 minutes to two minutes. The biggest achievement was working with the business to digitise the operating model and move away from purely physical visits to apprentices and employers and move to a mix of digital and physical engagements. This replaced the manual writing of Training Reports with a digital learning platform called myBCITO that allowed apprentices to digitally upload evidence of their work, digitised their learning material, and allowed BCITO training advisors to digitally grade learner progress.

    Customer Value

    Between March 2020 and July 2021 the digital group delivered the digital learning platform myBCITO to enable the business to offer digital learning to 22,000 apprentices and a view of their learning progress to both learners and employers. myBCITO now has 33,000 users doing one million page impressions each week with a high level of apprentice and employer satisfaction. myBCITO has replaced a box of learning books with a digital education platform, the ability to upload evidence of learning; an at-a-glance view of learning progress and goals. The digital learning platform has enabled the business to move to a digitally-driven operating model and created a highly effective digital learning platform.

    myBCITO is a cloud-based work-based digital learning tool built on the Canvas learning management system.

    Digital leadership at the forefront

    BCITO’s digital transformation strategy comes from a holistic digital benchmarking to give the executive team and board a tangible measure of current state and future state. The benchmarking measures are:

    1.     Digital Customer Value

    2.     Digital Brand Performance

    3.     Mindset and Culture

    4.     Operating Model

    5.     Infrastructure

    “We’re focused on embedding digital leadership across the organisation and delivering a digital transformation that enables an operating model change and brings all parts of the business together with customer at the centre,” Fletcher-Dobson says.

    The Digital Group uses an Agile Delivery methodology to focus on iteratively delivering business outcomes. The message from the start was that organisations need business strategies for a digital world, not just digital strategies, to truly transform. Changing mindsets and getting business leaders to think about outcomes rather than building things was a key challenge, Fletcher-Dobson says.

    “Gaining the support of the executive leadership team to implement a prioritisation framework and agile working practices was critical and required both demonstrating a clear vision and strategy for the digital transformation but also positioning the digital group as enabling the business outcomes through a clear digitally-driven business strategy.”

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