Opera Australia CIO touts social media, mobility as top IT priorities

Social media, outsourcing and mobility are top-of-mind for Opera Australia CIO, Grant Creswell.

Speaking to CIO Australia about his role at the not-for-profit, Creswell said the business is using social media to communicate with a new generation of Australian opera fans.

“We’ve been doing a lot of things in order to build our younger audience so social media is high on our agenda,” Creswell said.

“We’ve got this great storyline and infrastructure that’s fascinating and we want to extend that through to social media.”

Mobility is another priority for the Sydney based CIO, with Creswell saying Opera Australia staff members are always on the move.

“We’re focusing more on the fact that our people are mobile and everyone in the company has to do things and go somewhere,” he said.

“You get stage managers, company managers, lighting staff, props managers and they are all out there.”

As is the case with many Australian not-for-profits, an investment in outsourcing is important to Creswell, who recently said his game plan is about conserving resources, and as a result, there is only one other staff member working as part of Opera Australia’s internal IT team.

“We have one staff member in IT and her role is really to be the legs on the ground to facilitate things,” he said.

“We make sure that we use products that are well supported…we’re not an IT company, we make opera.”

Next on Opera Australia’s IT agenda are plans to implement an archiving system for the large volume of data the organisation has.

“We’ve got such a large range of old information,” Creswell said. “This includes images, films, video, text, and so we’re looking very seriously at how we archive and store this information.”

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