Andy Penn

And I think what the company had done in response to that was to look for new avenues of growth, new avenues of investment, but that were not part of the core business.

And ultimately, we all know what sort of happens when companies go into adjacencies in new areas.

That's not always successful.

And that was partly the case in Telstra's case.

But the bigger point was it was also distracting attention from dealing what we fundamentally had to deal with was a major transformation.

In Telstra's case, the root cause of the problem was that we were providing a poor level of service because we had a complex infrastructure.

systems environment and we had under-invested in addressing many of the challenges which existed there.

At its heart, it was a digital transformation because we could see

competitors, not only our competitors, but other organizations that were providing a much better level of customer experience than we were.

And that's what we were being benchmarked against.

And to address that, we really needed to upgrade our digital environment.

And this was a major learning for me, which is that I think that most

digital transformations fail because people believe the problem is the systems.

It doesn't originate in the systems.

It originates in the complexity and the way in which we've chosen to do business over many, many years.

And unless you proceed a digital transformation with a major business simplification, my view is it will fail.

If you think about a company like Telstra, at the time we launched the T22 program, we had 1,800 employees.

different plans for our customers.

So these are both the mobile phone plans, home internet plans, media plans, really simple things, but we had over 1,800 of them.

So in Telstra's case, we decided we would simplify and we went from 1,800 plans to 20.