“We now have no excuse and nothing holding us back” | Copyright Agency

When Copyright Agency – an Australian not-for-profit that stands up for creators – needed a critical overhaul of its end-of-life systems, Jeremy Jacobs, COO, CFO, and CIO at Copyright, instinctively took the opportunity to uplift the organisation as a whole.

ASG Group

Like many, Copyright was balancing its core competencies on aged systems that were posing a big risk. In a new digital world, a change was well overdue.

The four-year transformation involved attacking the lower hanging fruits first. Gaining confidence inside the organisation was key to influencing larger projects, such as investment in a new Salesforce CRM.  

Jacobs said they stuck to two things – people and principle.

“Our principles helped give us a north star towards success. We laid out the problem statement very clearly and we focused on doing as much as we could out of the box.

We spent an enormous amount of time on planning with ASG Group, our partner. ASG called this process Discover, Design, and Define. It was essential to understand what we wanted,” Jacobs said.

With 17 revenue streams and lots of rules for different lines of business, Copyright did not understate the complexity of the job.

“To become efficient we needed automation, but one can’t or shouldn’t automate broken processes. So, we followed our first principle which was obliterate – then automate.

We took the knowledge that resides in our people, and we trained them as product owners and immersed them in Agile. It was structure following strategy, utilising business expertise to lead IT. Not the other way around,” said Jacobs.

Despite the global pandemic starting right in the middle of the project, the team finished on time and on budget at the end of 2020. The decision to move to cloud helping Copyright to become unknowingly Covid-proof.

Jacobs said “We are a lot more confident in terms of resilience and capability to improve our digital capacity.

The aim was to deliver a system that was fit for the digital age. The improvements along the way through automation and reducing processes has meant significant operational efficiencies. Additionally our members can do things they never could, such as self-serving through a portal and getting transparent access to data.”

For Copyright, the vision to support creation of Australian content by making it easy for users to access copyrighted materials on fair terms, is now firmly in sight.

Jacobs says, “We’re now finally on the first step of our journey. Before, we never had the tools and capability to adapt to the market.

We can’t control how the environment is going to change but we can adapt and plan for it. The new CRM will enable us to bolt anything onto our business that we need.

We now have no excuse and nothing holding us back.”  

See the full case study for the Copyright Agency’s digital transformation with ASG Group.