Privacy Risk in Australia

This week is Privacy Awareness Week in Australia, and I attended a webinar on AI, automated decision-making and privacy risk, presented by privacy law expert Anna Johnston from Helios Salinger. Over a thousand people registered for the webinar, an impressive effort.

The webinar covered a lot of ground. What it mostly did for me was reinforce a view I’ve held for a while: privacy risk in Australia is consistently underestimated, frequently treated as a compliance checkbox, and almost never given the same weight as financial or reputational risk, despite being directly connected to both.

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This article was first published on the ENVEE Digital blog.  

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Interview with Institute of Community Directors - Boards urged to close tech gap

A couple of weeks ago I had a great chat with Matthew Schulz, a journalist at Our Community, after my post about the board pipeline problem for technology professionals.

That article landed earlier today - in the inboxes of more than 60,000 NFP leaders across Australia. That's a LOT more people than I expected to be talking to when I originally wrote about my own frustrating experience applying for board roles!

The piece covers the structural catch-22 that keeps technology expertise out of boardrooms: you can't get board experience without being on a board. Boards see the risk of appointing someone without governance history as more manageable than the risk of not having tech expertise - but that's a choice about which risk to accept, not an absence of risk. And right now, most boards are choosing the risk they understand less.

Ben McEvoy from Digital Directors ANZ puts the scale of it plainly: at the current rate, Australian boardrooms are on track to have one director with digital expertise by 2078. That's tongue-in-cheek, but the underlying governance problem it describes is real - and it applies well beyond the NFP sector.

If you work with or on boards, or are a technology professional who's been through the experience-required merry-go-round, worth a read.

Click here to read the article by the Institute of Community Directors Australia 

Learn more on the ENVEE Digital blog - Digital Strategy at the executive level

This article was first published on LinkedIn

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Your team is already using AI. Does your organisation know what for?

I just finished a conversation with a long-time client who was keen to show off their new toy – a Claude.ai account their organisation had recently set up.

They’d been exploring what it could do and had just discovered something that genuinely impressed them. “Claude – can you see my email?” Yes. “Can you look through a specific folder, find all the emails with attached invoices, and compile the amounts into a single spreadsheet?” Yes – it was already running.

They told me this in the way you tell someone about a magic trick. “So cool!” Delighted, as they should be – that’s a genuinely useful capability that would have taken several hours to do manually.

I responded with something that was, apparently, mildly alarmed. Not dramatically – just a beat of “you did what?”

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This article was first published on the ENVEE Digital blog.  

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Australian Boards and Technology Governance

 

My husband attended the AICD Australian Governance Summit in Sydney earlier this month. He called me a couple of times to check in and give me a run down.

Almost every session, he said, touched on AI and technology governance, and the urgent need for boards to have more digital expertise.

I've just read the AICD's report on AI use by directors and boards (link to their post in the comments). It's thoughtful and well-researched. It talks about AI literacy, the risks of directors using public AI tools on sensitive board papers and the importance of human judgment remaining central to governance. It doesn't mention the pipeline problem though.

I hold the AICD Foundations of Directorship credential and an MBA. I have 30 years of hands-on technology experience across enterprise, NFP and SME organisations. I've reported directly to boards and CEOs on technology strategy and risk. By the AICD's own definition, I'm exactly the kind of person they're saying boards need.

I also can't get onto a board without prior board experience. And I can't get prior board experience without being on a board. 🤯 

This isn't a new problem. Australian boards have long operated as a relatively closed system, with roles going to people who already hold board roles - predominantly lawyers and finance professionals, predominantly older and with limited technology expertise. ASIC Chair Joe Longo noted recently that directors with a technology background represent less than 8% of Australian boards, numbers which have scarcely changed in the past year.

Now the institutions that built that system are saying boards urgently need people with technology and AI expertise. The people who actually have that expertise at depth are, on average, not lawyers or CPAs, younger, and mostly haven't yet accumulated the governance CVs that get you into the room.

I don't have a clean solution to this. Boards are genuinely trying to grapple with a fast-moving space, and the AICD report reflects that seriously.

I do think it's worth naming the gap between the problem being described and the structural barriers preventing it from being solved.

AICD report referenced in this post - AI use by directors and boards: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/australianinstituteofcompanydirectors_boardroom-conversations-are-shifting-from-activity-7441589560666615808-xx4H/ 

Learn more on the ENVEE Digital blog - Digital Strategy at the executive level

This article was first published on LinkedIn

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The referral network has changed: have you adjusted?

Many small service businesses have relied on referrals for years – and for good reason, because it worked. A solid local reputation, good relationships with complementary professionals and clients who mentioned you to people they knew was enough to keep the phone ringing. Nobody needed a marketing strategy.

But in my experience working with small and medium businesses, that reliable flow of referrals has quietly dried up for a lot of them lately, which has come as a bit of a shock.

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This article was first published on the ENVEE Digital blog.  

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Most businesses are using AI now and most aren’t getting much back

Earlier this year, a report from MIT’s NANDA research initiative landed with a thud on LinkedIn. The finding getting most of the attention: despite somewhere between $30 and $40 billion in enterprise investment in generative AI, only around 5% of AI pilot projects are reaching production at scale with measurable business impact.

LinkedIn responded predictably. Pages of profound observations followed, most of them – I’ll be diplomatic here – somewhat repetitive and suspiciously well-formatted.

I don’t want to add to that pile. But the underlying finding is worth talking about properly, because it confirms something a lot of practitioners have been sensing for a while.

We’re now more than halfway through the financial year. If your organisation committed to doing something meaningful with AI tools in FY2025-26, November is a reasonable moment to ask honestly how that’s going.

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This article was first published on the ENVEE Digital blog.  

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Your website isn’t invisible: it just isn’t showing up where people are looking

Most businesses built their online presence around one idea: rank well on Google, get found, get enquiries. It worked well for twenty years, but then something shifted.

A client came to me earlier this year having noticed exactly this problem. Traffic to their website was up year-on-year. Rankings for their key search terms looked solid. And yet enquiries weren’t keeping pace. Something wasn’t adding up.

When we dug into the data, the picture became clearer – and it’s a pattern I’m now seeing across multiple SME clients. AI-powered search is changing how people find information online, and the gap between “ranking well” and “getting found by people ready to enquire” is widening for businesses that haven’t noticed the shift yet.

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This article was first published on the ENVEE Digital blog. 

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Is Your Website Content Holding You Back? How to Audit for AI Visibility

As AI-powered search tools like Copilot, ChatGPT and Perplexity become more common, many businesses are starting to realise their website content no longer performs the way it used to – not because people search differently, but because search results are now presented differently.

Recently, a client asked for help improving their search visibility. Their site looked fine on the surface, but after a quick audit it was clear the content hadn’t been touched in years. Service pages were thin, FAQs were buried in blog posts, and key offerings weren’t described in detail. Another client had migrated to a new platform but hadn’t updated legacy content – the structure was solid, but the messaging was still stuck in 2016.

Here’s how we approach content audits to improve visibility in AI-powered search results.

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This article was first published on the WebSolutionZ.com.au blog.  

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What Cloudflare’s AI block means for SEO and strategy

Cloudflare has started blocking AI crawlers from accessing its clients’ websites by default. This matters because it changes the fundamental economics of publishing online content.

For the past twenty years, the deal was straightforward: search engines crawled your content, indexed it, and sent you traffic in return. You got visitors, they got comprehensive search results, everyone benefited.

AI models broke that arrangement. They crawl your content, extract what they need and generate answers - without sending traffic back. No attribution, no visibility, no return. You did the work but they take the value.

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This article was first published on the ENVEE Digital blog. 

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The myth of set and forget technology investments

There’s a pattern that repeats itself across organisations of every size: new technology gets implemented successfully, then the assumption is that it’s sorted for the next five years. The system is running, the migration is done, the CRM is deployed. Move on.

Technology doesn’t work that way. What performs well today becomes a liability in three years if nobody is paying attention.

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This article was first published on the ENVEE Digital blog. 

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Digital strategy at the executive level

I’ve sat in boardrooms on both sides of the table – as an internal Head of IT and as an external advisor. I’ve also completed the Australian Institute of Company Directors “Foundations of Directorship” course. The pattern is consistent: technology gets treated as operational support rather than part of digital strategy.

IT appears on the agenda when something’s broken or budget’s needed. The rest of the time, technology decisions happen elsewhere – usually in response to immediate problems rather than strategic planning.

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This article was first published on the ENVEE Digital blog. 

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Challenging Assumptions

Yesterday I read an ABC News article about Australian attitudes toward Elon Musk. That wasn’t what caught my attention though.

The poll data showed that 16% of respondents had never heard of Bill Gates, and 20% had never heard of Jeff Bezos.

Seriously? Having worked in IT and digital for over 30 years, this floored me. These are household names in my professional world. Apparently not for a significant portion of the Australian population. Who are these people?! 🤔

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This article was first published on LinkedIn and is also on the ENVEE Digital blog. 

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Masters of Business Administration (MBA) completed

Very happy to have formally completed my MBA with distinction this afternoon at the RMIT University Graduation Ceremony! 🎓❤️ 

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IT Current State Assessment

I’ve worked with not-for-profit and community organisations for years. The pattern is relatively consistent: technology initiatives operate separately from organisational strategy, creating inefficiencies that compound over time.

Recently I worked with an NFP to deliver a comprehensive Current State Assessment for their IT function. The process revealed where things were working, where they weren’t and what needed to change.

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This article was first published on LinkedIn and is also on the ENVEE Digital blog. 

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Why SMEs Need Better Digital Organisation

Many business owners don’t realise how much time they lose every day just trying to find things in their digital infrastructure. Files buried in inboxes, websites that are hard to update, customer data scattered across different platforms – it all adds up to frustration and wasted hours.

Small and medium businesses rely on digital tools to run smoothly. But without clear systems, structured content and organised data, everything becomes harder than it needs to be.

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This article was first published on the WebSolutionZ.com.au blog.  

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Foundations of Directorship results

Happy to have successfully passed all three "Foundations of Directorship" exams via Australian Institute of Company Directors last week, after completing the courses in April. 👍

#Governance

#RiskAndStrategy

#Finance

#CompanyDirector

#Director

#aicd

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Atlassian targets tree-changers in flexible working recruitment drive

My first focus reading this was all about Scott Farquhar of Atlassian working from a motorhome last year and I was already mentally dusting off my van cover - but actually the interesting line is this:

“We’re already at record low unemployment, so there’s not people sitting there, twiddling their thumbs, waiting to join the tech industry. We’re going to have to retrain people from other industries to do that.”

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Brooks Law

A great way to demonstrate how lines of communication become more complicated when teams get larger.

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The Entire Content Creation Process in 17 Steps and a Single Flowchart

Been getting back into a bit of writing lately and I found this really useful:

The Entire Content Creation Process in 17 Steps and a Single Flowchart

https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/content-creation-process/

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Build your personal brand with a Facebook "Public figure" page

OK, so based on THIS (and a conference I attended earlier in the year):
https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-public-figure-page-how-to-create/

I've created THIS: https://www.facebook.com/NickyVeitchAU/ 

where I'm apparently trying to do THIS:

"Use a public figure page (which differs from your personal profile) to share professional stories that help people get to know you as a businessperson, not as a friend."

I personally think calling myself a "Public figure" is quite hilarious, but OK, I'll play... 🤔😨😵🤔🤔🤔

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