Peter Turnbull joined BAI in 2015 as its CIO. He brought with him many years’ of digital experience in the banking and financial services sector, but as he says: “Core technology is ubiquitous, you really challenge yourself to understand how the business capabilities interact and learn the language of the domain.” While broadcasting is a key service of BAI in Australia through the Broadcast Australia business, the company had already started its expansion  into transit communications in other markets.

“The brief I was given was as unique as it was challenging – establish a technology platform to modernise the core IT capabilities of a mature business (Broadcast Australia), enable the wider BAI Communications Group to enter into new regions and build a foundation to connect our established international subsidiaries.” These three goals presented a challenge he found irresistible.

Though the technology infrastructure was largely on-premise and imperfectly connected across the group, he quickly realised his biggest challenge was cultural. Like many traditional IT organisations, IT operated as a service provider with a contract to ‘the business’. Switching this mindset and moving the conversation from ‘IT and the business’ to ‘IT is part of the business’ that continues to enable but also contributes to the business strategy, has been fundamental.

As BAI Communications expands quickly into new markets, to do this it needed to realign the perception of IT in the business and move its technology to the cloud. In this article, John O’Hanlon, Gigabit Magazine, summarises the first chapter of CIO Peter Turnbull’s digital transformation. You can read the full article here.