Can we be pragmatic about business growth? Find out at Tech Talks Perth with Nathaniel Williams, CIO of Hopper Industrial Group –Orica Digital Solutions
Nathaniel Williams has spent 20 years working in software engineering across many industries in companies of all sizes. Originally from Canada, he moved to Australia in 2018 to provide consulting services to the mining industry and is now CIO & Software Eng. Manager for the Perth-based Hopper Industrial Group.
They have recently been acquired by Orica, the world’s largest provider of commercial explosives and innovative blasting systems for mining and are poised to lead their ongoing efforts to innovate within mining blast offerings.
Nathaniel is joining CORE for Tech Talks on Tuesday, September 20 where he will be discussing his pragmatic approach to business growth. Exploring topics such as:
Growth on a Budget
Options Analysis – Time vs Money
Compromises in Service
Technical Depth
Ahead of his session we took 5 with Nathaniel to learn a little more.
CORE: What does your role entail within the business and what will your key focus be in the coming months?
The role is quite broad, providing direction & implementation of enterprise level security & business productivity tools, along with bespoke software to manage our fleet of products.
The next few months are primarily focused on consolidation of enterprise architecture and systems, and the release of a few new answer products to our customers.
CORE: What are 2-3 industry challenges you are facing/coming across?
a) Pace of change – It can take quite a while to go from initial meets to a trial, let alone a full contract for new and innovative technologies within mining.
b) Resources – We are still struggling to rebound from the reduction in available staff that occurred in WA due to Covid
CORE: What are your thoughts around the pace of technological change in the resources sector?
I believe we are seeing some impressive strides in anything that can be tied to carbon neutral and HSE, but that the industry is still lagging on my other fronts due to the sheer size of operations and volume of data making many things very difficult to tackle.
CORE: What does innovation mean to you?
Data drives everything, and we have more than we know what to do with. To me innovation in this field is leveraging what we already have in new way – not necessarily adding more to the pile.
CORE: What are you most excited about covering in your upcoming session?
I don’t see a lot of talks or discussions focused on companies of our size (~80ppl) and how they should approach their enterprise technical landscape, so I am hoping to be able to provide some insights and highlight the differences in approach vs those of much larger companies.
Find out more and join us at Tech Talks!
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