Client Synopsis
ChoiceOrganisation Overview
CHOICE is the leading consumer advocacy group in Australia. Independent and member-funded, CHOICE exists to ensure that Australian consumers get a fair go. Formed at a meeting at Sydney Town Hall in September 1959, the Australian Consumers’ Association started out with about 50 members and 50 pounds in the bank. By April 1960, the first edition of CHOICE magazine was sent to 500 subscribers. There was clearly a need – within a year, the magazine had 10,000 subscribers and by the end of the decade, more than 100,000.
When the Internet arrived, CHOICE was fast to jump on board – while it still publishes magazines, today most of its supporters prefer its digital tools and information. Today, CHOICE is still as versatile, adaptable and relevant as it was over 50 years ago – fighting for consumers and uncovering the truth. Its’ accredited laboratory is one of the few places in the world where you’ll see staff strapping strollers to treadmills, baking hundreds of scones in a week or subjecting toys to torture – all in the quest to find out what consumers really want to know.
CHOICE remains fiercely independent, proudly nonprofit and non-partisan, and with more than 160,000
members, it is Australia’s largest and loudest consumer movement.
Fragile to Agile Engagement
Our first encounter with CHOICE was when their then Head of Digital delivery attended our “EA Essentials”
course, during which he identified that this approach was exactly what CHOICE needed to drive the next iteration of its ICT Strategy. Our first direct engagement with CHOICE was to execute our brief (4-day) standard Health Check and Discovery service which delivered a findings and recommendations report and a fixed-price quote for assistance addressing key gaps identified. The first of these gaps was to extract a set of measurable business outcomes from the business strategy and then leverage these plus applicable general industry (IT and Business) trends to deliver the ICT Strategy for CHOICE. During this initial engagement, we also performed a “deep-dive” technical assessment of a key strategic project already underway – the redevelopment of the member APIs – to ensure that it was being executed in a manner consistent with the desired target state.
Our next engagement at CHOICE was to review their existing “core system” – NETSUITE – to assess its ongoing suitability as CHOICE’s core platform and particularly its ability to support their future
strategy.