How did our technology favourites stack up over 2023?
When we sent out our first issue of The Bottom Line in March 2023, we asked our leadership team what technologies they predicted would have the biggest impact on their roles in 2023 – and why.
We’re now going full circle and asking them if their chosen technology favourites lived up to their expectations for the year.
Rebecca Tohill was our CEO at the time (she’s since passed the banner to Sven Martin) and nominated Teams as her go-to technology for 2023 – and the three years prior. For her, it bridged the communication gap created by the pandemic and the significant uptake of remote working – without missing a beat. And now? While Rebecca has stepped back from her high-pressure role (but is still on the Fusion5 executive), she still uses Teams and sees it as one of the most valuable technologies she’s used in her role.
In his at-the-time Executive Director and Chief Revenue Officer role, Sven Martin expressed his enthusiasm for the change in Fusion5’s data strategy. He foresaw the potential for powerful analysis of growth trends and opportunities, consolidated and automated budget reporting, a centralised version of the truth, and instant access to trends and performance variations. Anticipated outcome? Being able to identify how and where we can become more efficient, and maximise the value driven from the time and effort put into the business. Did his dream deliver? Sven says, “The investment has meant that in 2023, we've been able to track and measure against updated forecasts and easily incorporate the acquisitions budgets. We’ve been able to centralise the 2024 budget process with easy comparison to 2023 actuals, budgets, and revised forecasts to ensure we have clear visibility of profitability, margin, and revenue trends.”
Greg Marshall, CFO, nominated the more expansive use of Workday Adaptive Planning as a key reporting tool to deliver financial results and targeted business metrics to Fusion5’s front-line managers as his game-changer. Anticipating 2023 as a year which promised to be challenging for the economy, businesses, and individuals alike, he said that real-time financial information and analysis coupled with accurate rolling forecasts could make the difference between surviving and succeeding. And did it? "Yes,” says Greg. "Workday Adaptive Planning has continued to deliver faster financial consolidated reporting and our ability to track and analyse actual performance vs our budgets and forecasts in detail throughout the year."
In her article, Stephanie Moore, General Manager - People & Performance, took delight in the service management platform, 4me. With its ability to streamline Fusion5’s people processes, from recruitment to onboarding to offboarding, and to produce every variation of actual and what-if reporting in between, she wondered why we’d done things ‘the hard way’ for so long. So, how did it pan out for her? Today, Stephanie is as excited and happy about 4me as ever. “4me has been instrumental in transforming our HR, Recruitment, and Admin teams. Since the implementation, we’ve streamlined more processes, and all requests come into a central point so anyone in the team can action a request. There’s no bottleneck if someone’s away, and there’s a significant reduction in the number of emails sent to other team members for the same request. 4me ensures the right approvals have been completed before the request is actioned vs reaching out and checking if approved.”
Kris Jackson, General Manager - Enterprise Cloud & Security, foresaw 2023 as ‘the year of better monitoring and response services’ with the help of PagerDuty. He anticipated that the new functionality in PagerDuty would speed up our response time and potentially reduce the ongoing costs to our customers. And, of course, make his role easier, knowing that Fusion5 is doing more for you – more efficiently – while freeing up the resources needed to drive continuous improvement. So, is that how it happened? It sure did, says Kris. “The enhancements to our PagerDuty platform have significantly impacted our ability to support our customers more quickly - without needing to add more resources just to cope with the increase in alerts. It's enabling us to respond to critical alerts faster and ensures we can continue to scale up our services."
