Meet Chris Burke, and his new venture Tadashi: Part 3

In Part 2, we explored the Tadashi process and how building new tech might not always be the best option for issues in the health industry. In this article, we get the nitty gritty details of what Tadashi offers and how the rise of the digital BA might be a good thing for health.

What do you like to ‘bake in’ from the beginning when you start to work with a new client?

[CB]: I approach the discovery phase of working with a new client using my background as a Business Analyst (BA). I’m really interested and passionate about analysing business needs and, essentially, it’s where we look at the business and their requirements.

There are different flavours of BA’s too, such as:

• A digital BA (if your knowledge is in digital)
• A technical BA (these are usually people with a web development background), or
• A BA for just about any discipline or industry.

I’d also like to call out the term ‘product owner’ here. Often if there’s a product being built, someone will be designated the owner of the product.

Yes, what exactly is a ‘product owner’ and how does this relate to a BA?

[CB]: If it’s a big organisation where they have enough knowledge and resources in-house, they’ll have someone who is the product owner. They’re responsible for steering the ship and making sure the product gets built to the right specifications — they own the product.

If not, then a BA can wear two hats and also be the product owner. This person considers all the factors, like what the business is trying to achieve, and makes sure the product being built answers all of those kinds of questions.

So, coming at a problem from the BA angle, where someone is championing the requirements and can tease those things out — both from the business side and from our side, the digital side — can bring amazing benefits. At the crux of it is being analytical and putting the lens over different parts of the business, like behavioural change and process, not just technology, for example.

What’s Tadashi’s relationship to technology in this context?

[CB]: Tadashi is technologically agnostic. What that means is that sometimes agencies or tech people focus on whatever their niche is, but we’ve had experience across a variety of things. When we come along to solve problems, we don’t necessarily get tied to how we’re going to solve that problem with this technology; it’s more about asking questions like, ‘ what are the problems’ and ‘ what would be the best way forward ‘. If it happens to be a certain technology, then we can weigh up those options in an analytical, unbiased way.

In doing the analysis and the discovery — whether it results in documentation or a strategy, or something else — it’s ideally striving to provide the business with the information that they need to decide on a solution. So, we’re not necessarily making the decision — we can, and we often do, and can certainly hand hold someone through that — we take clients through a process to help them get the information they need to go away and make the right decision for their organisation.

So that’s one of the key Tadashi offering — expertise. Like you were saying before, it’s not just making a recommendation on a product, it’s also helping people understand the process behind these bigger business decisions. The advantage there is that someone like you can come in and walk them through the process from start to finish.

[CB]: Yes, but it’s two-fold. There’s the process — which is often the barrier to entry for people in those types of scenarios to move forward — and this is where Tadashi has a lot of experience in teasing out those sticky points.

But the other side of it is bringing the wealth of digital knowledge in to know what the right questions are to ask, to know what’s possible, and to be able to marry up what the requirements are with the likely scenario.

For example, are they going to answer that with an app, or a website, or an internal system? The analysis is one side of it, but we also bring the knowledge — an extensive digital toolkit.

What are some of the things in this digital toolkit?

[CB]: What I see as the biggest opportunity is bringing digital knowledge to health that’s not there yet. Having worked in other industries from the very large and very small, to the in between with not-for-profits, we’ve been exposed to many different situations. We can bring that knowledge to health, and like I said before, you don’t know what you don’t know, so we can educate people on what the possibilities actually are.

From the tech side of things, we’ve got tonnes of experience building new products, like websites or apps. We’ve been involved in websites that are complex and talk to different systems, and these sites can take on so many different forms.

Can you give us an example?

[CB]: Absolutely! Years ago, we were involved in the tender for a project in Western Australia where they wanted a system to track their laundry, sheets and pillowcases, going in and out of a hospital. They went to market not really knowing what the answer was going to be, but that’s the point of going to market — to find the experts who can tell you what you need.

They said in the tender that they need some way of tracking where the laundry is, whether it’s washed or dirty, onsite or offsite, and a way to manage it from a desktop computer or on an iPad while out and about in the hospital. We’ve done this kind of job so many times before for clients in other industries. To us, the solution looked like a very simple content management system (CMS) where the content is physical (a sheet or a bag of linen) and we assign it a serial number and a few different status’ (dirty or clean, onsite or offsite). When it’s dropped down a laundry shoot, it’s ticked off in the system on the iPad or desktop and they can keep track of all the linen.

We can see that answer clearly because we have experience with these kinds of scenarios, whereas the people in the hospital had no picture of what that should look like in their minds. We didn’t build that system, but we were involved in the tender process.

In Part 4, we talk to Chris about the digital space and how it might benefit health in Australia.

Originally published at https://www.tadashi.com.au on February 7, 2019.