Cathy O'Sullivan: Hello and welcome to 娇色导航Leadership Live. I'm Cathy O'Sullivan, Editorial Director for 娇色导航Australia, and today, I'm delighted to be joined by Adam Wrightson, who is the Chief Technology Officer at HOYTS. Welcome Adam, great to have you on the show today. ?

Adam Wrightson: Yes, thanks for having me. Looking forward to our discussion. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan: Thanks for being with us and so look, I'd love to hear more about your career journey and how you ended up in the CTO role at HOYTS. ? ?

Adam Wrightson: Well, that's a very interesting story.

Cathy, when I was at high school, the only thing I ever wanted to be was a was a pilot in the Australian Air Force, probably like a lot of people, and I always grew up with a passion for the movies as well.

And believe it or not, I actually did some work experience in in cinema when I was at high school, but my, my focus was very much on joining the Air Force.

And it only takes a few hours for those dreams to be crushed when you when you get told, well, thanks for applying, but, but no thanks.

And I think that's really what steered me into technology after that was, well, what, what was my sort of next thing that I thought that I was pretty good at, and it was sort of technology. And so that's what got me into technology.

I ended up being a software developer. I went to, was studying at willon University, working at bhp, which was just down the road, and I really enjoyed the challenge of writing software that sort of made a difference to business.

And so an opportunity came up for me to move back to Sydney. I worked at Macquarie Bank for a year in the mid 90s, and if most people will know, it was called the millionaires factory back in, back in the mid 90s.

But what I very quickly worked out, at least for myself, was that I didn't have a passion for banking. And I think, like, like anyone you know, if you could sort of do what you love as well as make a living from it, you're usually better at it.

And so an opportunity came up for me to join Val Morgan. And Val Morgan is a cinema advertising media company, and I had the opportunity through the late 90s to literally rewrite their whole ERP platform, which is sort of what got me into cinema.

And I guess one thing led to another, Hoyts ended up joining with Val Morgan under an ownership with consolidated press holdings and the packet group.

And that's sort of how I got involved in Hoyts, and then I was lucky enough, I guess, to lead an industry transition from analog film to digital, which, after 100 years of showing movies using celluloid film, moving to digital was a huge opportunity and a huge transition.

And that, sort of what got me into was my sort of 娇色导航journey into Hoyts.

And sort of that culminated in sort of 2010 when we formed the Hoyt cinema Technology Group, which ended up being the combination of the IT functions for Val Morgan, the IT functions for HOYTS cinemas as well as, I guess, the engineering division, or the Technical Services Division of bringing together all of the projection and sound expertise all into one combined cinema technology group.

So that's sort of been my whirlwind journey to where I am today. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? So tell us a bit more than about that CTO role, and what is, what is your responsibility, and what does your team look after across the organisation? ?

Adam Wrightson: Well, we look after everything that you would expect a traditional IT department to look after. So we're doing the IT service desk. Yeah, we've got networking and infrastructure.

We're doing security now, but we're also doing support of all of the business systems as well as doing our own we've got our own development team in internally as well.

And then in addition to that, we've got this Technical Services Division which looks after all of the projection and sound and make sure that we're on screen. 24/7, 365, days of the year. So really it culminates all of those functions.

And then, separately from that, what came out of that transition from of I guess, the creation of the technology, the cinema Technology Group, and the fact that we were also now looking after.

The, I guess the operational systems in the cinemas, ie the projection and sound equipment, is that we then formed a technical services company where we now, today, for the last decade, have now been supplying those services to some of our competitors, into other post production houses and and other distribution companies around the country.

So we've created this, I guess, ability, this function, which subsidizes our own, own internal function by providing these services built on a strong capability that we've we've built over many years to provide those services externally as well.

So that for me, has been I think what I find most interesting about my role is the breadth of the technology responsibilities that I have, both from looking after internal systems, but also being able to be involved in solving business problems or supporting systems for external customers as well.

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Cathy O'Sullivan: Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. The amount of change in the media and entertainment industry and technology has such a driving role in that.

So tell us a bit more than Adam about some of those key digital initiatives that you've led at whits over the years, and what kind of impact have they had? ?

Adam Wrightson: Yeah, look, I mean, I've been very privileged over my entire career at Hoyts, which I think, as you said, is, it's been a long time. It's sort of, you know, it's coming up on almost three decades.

And through that time, I've, as I said, I've done everything from develop an ERP system, but believe it or not, still runs our mortgage business today, right through to a digital transition of you know, our Hoyts business, from from analog film to digital projection and sound to then In more recent years, you know, leading a digital strategy to, I guess, reinvent our entire digital journeys and our digital workflows for our customers.

And I guess that's really been the focus in the last three or four years. And it started with a strategy which was, I guess, driven in the first instance by our CEO who talked about, I guess, digital being the new battleground for competition.

Hoyts had spent a significant amount of money upgrading our cinemas with reclining seats and differentiating that entire customer experience, and we wanted to replicate that, that, I guess, the in cinema experience with, you know, the digital experience, because that's the the journey that a customer goes through before they come and actually do, the physical experience in cinema.

And so we want to be best in class, be best in the world at delivering, you know, the best possible digital experiences. And so that started with, obviously, with a strategy.

But the strategy involved not simply just changing some of those workflows or user journeys, but literally re architecting our entire digital infrastructure right from moving to micro services, micro services foundation for for for the code base, hosting it on Azure cloud, all of which gave us the performance and scalability and reliability that we were potentially missing in in our original in some of our earlier iterations of our website, and so that became the focus to reinvent, sorry, to re architect the website, and then on top of lay on top of that, streamlining the the user journeys for for the customers to make that easier.

And I think, I think that that is now culminated in in global recognition of the work that we've done on both our website and, more recently, our native app, both of which have won their relative awards in the Australian web awards, as well as being a finalist in this year's webbys for our most recent app development.

So I think for me, I guess it reinforces what we've achieved and what we set out to do, and getting that recognized, recognition, you know, somewhat, I guess it endorses that in that strategy, in what we've achieved. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? So let's dig into that a bit more. You know, from the big screen to the small screen. So how are you thinking about mobile in that broader digital experience. I mean, where does it play, you know, a role in that customer engagement. ?

Adam Wrightson:? It plays a very significant part of that, that user journey. More than 80% of our customers are engaging with us on a mobile device. So we have taken a mobile first view on everything.

So when, whenever we're looking at streamlining the user journey, or how something is going to work, it's all built from a mobile first point of view, because that's where, that's where and how our customers want to engage with us.

And so everything we've done has been absolutely mobile first, right? ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? So also, it's probably not something people think about when they're sitting down and enjoying a movie, but tell us about what you've done in terms of modernising your infrastructure.

You know, your networks, apps, how have they played a role in improving operations or that movie going experience? ?

Adam Wrightson:? Yeah, look, as I said, like, I mean, we, we re architected our, you know, the first, first part of it was to move to a new hosting platform, you know, we moved out into public cloud, You know, on a scalable, redundant, Azure platform, we then lay it over the top of that, the RE architected micro services architecture for our website, which is running on Kubernetes.

And so what that gave us was that scalability, and what we've learned the hard way is that our traffic can go from normal to 10 times, 20 times in a matter of minutes. So I'll give you a great example.

You know when, when you've got content that is in demand and you that coincides with rain outside and a public holiday. For example, we've seen instances where, literally, the whole of Australia wakes up and decides, I'm going to the movies today.

And the very first thing they do is they pick up their mobile phone and the first thing they do is type in the website, or they do a Google search and end up at the website.

And as you can imagine, that creates like a tsunami of demand on on our web environment. And so again, we live in an age where customers it's like turning on the tap. They just expect it to work.

You know, I think we've, we've all come a long way past a time when now it's sort of acceptable. The website's got to go down, or I can't make a payment, or I can't engage with a brand.

And so for us, you know, we've we also did a network upgrade, putting in quad redundancy into our cinemas, which is where, you know, the servers that sell the tickets and so on currently reside.

So all of those removing single point dependencies from our network infrastructure is just as important as those other components that I've just mentioned.

And so as I said, with 80% of people buying online, they just need to be able to literally pick up their mobile device, and it needs to work.

And what we've done in not only have we increased performance and reliability of our digital channels through through all of that, but we've actually reduced our costs as well.

It's actually enabled us to significantly reduce our Azure hosting costs because of the efficiencies that we've we've achieved through the auto scaling in the micro services implementation or architecture behind our new website and our new mobile app, ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? And of course, retail is becoming more of a bigger part of that voids experience. So how has digital helped you evolve that side of the business? ?

Adam Wrightson:? Yeah well, interestingly, HOYTS has had, you know, online gift stores for some time and again.

If I reflect on the last three, four years in that entire digital strategy, one of the key things that we did as part of that digital strategy was to say, you know, what, trying to host our own digital gift stores is really not the way to go.

And so, as part of that greater strategy where we we've obviously redeveloped our website, our ticketing and you know, our primary consumer facing websites and apps, we decided to move our gift stores to the online platform Shopify, which runs e commerce stores globally.

And what that gave us was, again, that reliability, scalability gives users a lot of familiarity with with their user journey for buying, yeah, merchandise, or in our case, we sell our gift cards. They.

Types of things on our on our store, and so it also came with a lot of built in promotional, promotional functionality as well that we're able to leverage.

So overall, again, ended up being just a great decision for us to move our gift stores onto a platform like Shopify just opened up a whole range of things that we weren't able to get to before.

It enables us to sell on social channels and a whole range of other things that we didn't have the ability to do before we now have the ability to do leveraging the Shopify platform. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? Now, cyber security is a major priority for every CIO, but obviously it was clearly a priority in your transformation. So what does that security first approach mean for you in real terms? ?

Adam Wrightson:? Well, I think you know, a lot of CIOs will talk about zero trust, and you know, that's a journey that's still a journey for us, but security has and continues to be probably the number one priority when we're thinking about anything that we do.

One of the things that we did, I talked about the quad redundancy and the the upgrade to our networking, or, you know, core networking infrastructure.

Part of that was to to lay over the top of that Cisco umbrella, which provides a level of cloud based security across across our network.

But in addition to that, and again, as part of this digital strategy, I feel like when I reflect on our digital strategy, there were so many components of it, right?

It was, it was everything from the infrastructure to what we did with the microservices, very architecting of the technology. But also security was a huge part of that as well.

And so as part of that, we've, we're working with, you know, a third party on having implemented a 24 by seven security operation center and monitoring and alerting and the collection of of long logs and events from from our network, again, to Create a holistic 360, degree sort of security strategy and view of our security 24/7 because that's what we need to do, given, given our type of business, and again, the expectation from customers that we're always on.

So of course, our security systems need to and processes need to be on 24/7 as well. So again, that that formed a huge part of the strategy, and certainly one of the major facets of what we've achieved over that time as well. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? So Adam, you've delivered a lot of change in the last few years. Talk to us about what kind of culture you've built to make that possible with your tech team? ?

Adam Wrightson:? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. You know, I think company culture is hugely important.

And I look at, I don't know whether it's our I'd like to think it's a combination of, yes, our industry, but also the culture that I've built within the technology department, but we have very low turnover and very long 10 years of employment.

And I think, you know, all leaders will say, you know, your success, success comes from surrounding yourself with great people. And I feel like I've done that.

I feel like, you know, I've got, you know, a Head of Development and architecture who who had the forethought to think about what, where we needed that strategy to be, what we needed to achieve, and giving them the the autonomy but support to do what they're good at, I think, is what breeds great outcomes, but also breeds a great culture for success.

And that's built around trust. You know? It's built around people trusting each other, and people, as I said, having the autonomy to to do what they do best.

Of course, it also comes with, you know, challenging those people you know, to go beyond just to, you know, have stretch goals, beyond just, you know, whatever it is that you're setting out to do.

I think if you if you have those stretch goals, then then ultimately, you achieve what you want to achieve, and hopefully, then summer, I feel like for us, I just as I said, I feel like it sort of all came together.

I think we had a clear vision and a clear strategy. And I think that's what people also enjoy. They want to know, not only that, they have.

Know, clear objectives of what you want them to achieve, but but how their achievements are going to actually impact the bigger picture.

And just just coincides with the fact that, you know, in in the last year or so, which has changed its tagline to Big Picture people, and that's what we have to be when we're looking at these types of IT strategies, I think. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? So look, any big change can be challenging.

And you mentioned there, you know what you've been doing internally in terms of the culture that you've built, but for you personally, what have been some of the biggest leadership challenges when you've been delivering such large-scale change, and how have you navigated it? ?

Adam Wrightson:? Well, I think, like, I like, like, any, any major change, you know, it's about having buy in from the rest of the C level and the other executives in the business, and not only buy in, but sometimes it means working very closely with my peers to achieve what they want to achieve as well.

So I work very closely with my director of marketing, who also looks after content and corporate sales like so she has a fairly large remit, and she is the primary stakeholder when it comes to our digital customers.

So certainly when it comes to our digital strategy, you know, my number one stakeholder is, is my director of marketing.

But of course, then we also have the CEO, who, of course, also has a very clear vision of of at least what he wants to achieve for the customer and the expectations around delighting our customers at every at every touch point.

And so he really has been the one to challenge and drive the agenda on, on that digital strategy.

And I think that him pushing, pushing us, also sort of identifying that digital would be, you know, the next battleground so for our business, I think has all helped us to really drive towards delivering the best, you know, the best possible outcome for our customer.

And I think we wanted to be the best in class, and I think that when we started this digital strategy a few years ago, we probably weren't where we wanted to be in relation to our competition and so on on that front.

But I think if I reflect back now, I honestly do think that we do have the best in class digital experiences, and that's all been driven by a combination of those influences from from the culture that we've built, right through to the influence of the other executives in our senior leadership team.

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Cathy O'Sullivan:? And as well as those internal stakeholders you mentioned that you've been working with a number of external parties, so talk to us about how those tech partners have supported you and the team, and what role they've played in your tech strategy. ?

Adam Wrightson:? So yes, our external partners have been extremely important in the whole strategy, I think, like a lot of CIOs, you're finding that balance between insourcing and outsourcing is always a challenge, and finding what's right for for you and your organization is and the type of project that you're working on is hugely important, but for us, our external partners have played an important role because they complement our internal resources, who have important IP and understanding of the unique systems that We have internally, and then the external parties provide insight into what is the latest technologies, what is the current trends for whether it be user experience and those types of things?

And I think when you combine those two, you get the best outcome, because you get the lowest total cost of ownership, because you're not in sourcing everything, but you're outsourcing the stuff that can be outsourced that is not necessarily unique to your business, and I think that that combination is what's worked well for us.

We've had a an external agency called Chook Digital who have really just been a breath of fresh air for us, because they're always challenging the status quo.

And also have a have a great understanding of what other online retailers, what other exhibitors are doing out there in the marketplace, and then bringing those ideas and saying, let's do this. We should do this. Expertise.

And again, they're the ones who have really pushed to, for example, nominate our website now app, for example, for these awards.

And that's what sort of, you know, they've been able to showcase not only the work that they've done, but the work that we've done together in delivering what we now believe are, you know, the best in class, sort of digital experiences.

And so you get that from a combination of having great people internally who understand your business and have the expertise inside with the best of what an outsourced agency or provider can deliver to you in relation to their expertise on understanding the latest technologies that are going to enable your business.

So, yeah, I think it's a great combination of finding, finding the two together is what delivers the best result, in my opinion. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? And then how do you balance, you know, operational excellence with pushing the envelope on innovation? ?

Adam Wrightson:? Yeah, look, I mean, I think, you know, for me, I'm a bit, probably OCD, you know, my attention to detail is probably second to none, yeah?

Like, I mean, I know that my, my people say that, you know, I can see a pixel that's out on, you know, one of the, one of the cinema screens. And I think that, you know, in order to get operational excellence, you've got to find a balance, right?

You can't be you can't, not everything. Can be perfect.

And I think that one of the things that I have learned over, over many years in my role is that, I know we talk about the 8020 rule, we we talk about those types of things, but I think that what can kill engineers, in particular when you're in your highly technical environments, is inertia caused by looking at all of the reasons why you can't do something, as opposed to finding a way to just make it happen.

And I think one of the things that I do encourage my my team, to do is is, let's just aim for Yeah, let's give it a go. It doesn't matter if it fails.

It doesn't matter if it's not perfect, because I do find at times that, particularly engineers, you know, they're very black and white.

It's like, you know, they instantly go to solution mode, and they instantly go to looking at all the reasons why something's not going to work, or all the problems that you're going to encounter.

And I think that you've got to sort of find a way to turn that on its head, to remove that inertia and get something done.

And I think that what happens is, when you get momentum that drives that sort of ongoing excellence, if you like, where you are, you're actually delivering something.

And then that, of course, unlocks the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, and that's what ultimately you want to do to make progress on something, particularly when they when a lot of what we do in it can be technically challenging at times. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? Now HOYTS' tagline you said is 'Big Picture People'. So with that in mind, looking ahead, what are some technologies or ideas that you're most excited about exploring next? ?

Adam Wrightson:? Well, this is probably going to be a bit of a cliche, but everybody's talking about AI, right?

So I think that CIOs and businesses everywhere are all under, you know, this pressure, if you like to, you know, find, how is AI going to help, help you and help your business? And I think that there's no question.

There's lots of hype around AI, but, but, but there's also, as it's now starting to evolve, you know, there's definitely some, some really good use cases that are coming from it.

And so you know, what's on the horizon for us is again, being 100% focused on the customer and that customer experience, and leveraging AI to enhance that customer experience.

And so for us, that continues to be, how do I make it easier for our customer to find, find what they might want to see at the movies, encourage them to come and see it, find the appropriate time for them to come and see it, but then also guide them through that journey.

And so we've got some very interesting stuff that we've got in the pipeline that I can't really talk about, but, but it's all centered around, how do we make that customer journey more experience and give them more more information about what it is there, what they're doing in the context of when it's relevant to them?

And so that that's really our focus. And so yes, we'll, we intend to use.

Is obviously some AI in that, but we also really much, very much, focused on continuing to push the envelope, on making it easier for the customer to do whatever it is that they're doing with our business, whether that be buying food and beverage right through to understanding what movies coming out in the next month or the next two months that they might want to see.

So that's where our focus will be in the next six months. ? ?

Cathy O'Sullivan: Well, we look forward to hearing about the next initiatives. Adam Wrightson, Chief Technology Officer at HOYTS, thank you so much for joining us today. ?

Adam Wrightson:? It's been a pleasure. Thank you.