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As marketing, customer, digital, and technology leaders work to orchestrate wide-scale transformation across their organizations to meet changing customer demands and needs, an instrumental player in their success is the company board.

But couple the digital and marketing literacy gap across many Australian boardrooms, with the high risks of undertaking transformation and significant costs of the technology and skills required to achieve it, and it’s clear educating and securing board buy-in is no easy task.

During the recent Adobe Summit, executives across several Australian brands shared how they’re working to ensure their organisations’ boards understand and embrace digital transformation and strategy.

Tourism Australia’s GM strategy and transformation, Paul Bailey, said the tourism body’s board has been a key partner in its digital transformation journey over the last seven years.

“Digital transformation represents a lot of things, and it’s really hard as a board director to know where you do or don’t play,” Bailey said.

“The board has been very good at leaning into those discussions and providing guidance at the strategic and strategy level, which has also ensured technology and data are underpinning this growing demand.”

The telco’s executive director of digital, Jenni Barnett, said it was the board that realized the need for such a large-scale transformation.

“There was recognition Telstra needed to disrupt itself, move a lot faster, completely transform our digital experiences and our customer experiences irrespective of channels, simplify our products, fix our back-end and spaghetti systems, and at the same time blow up our ways of working and move to Agile ways of working.

If you walked in and asked anyone working at Telstra what T22 is, they will understand this in terms of where we are headed as a company, which is transforming our customer experiences and systems.” Obviously, the CEO also then needs to be part of that to have a clear strategy on what is digital transformation, customer experience, or however they want to call the transformation internally, to help with that strategic discussion and to ensure it’s not a tactical discussion in the boardroom.”

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