Meet Chris Burke, and his new venture Tadashi: Part 4

In Part 3 of our interview with Tadashi’s Chris Burke, we learned what Tadashi plans to offer health and about the rise of the digital BA. In this article, we look at the digital space and how it might benefit health in Australia.

Can you talk about some of the benefits of technology for health?

[CB]: Technology is a very broad area encompassing many different elements. It’s one thing if you’re building digital products, then there’s other things to consider, such as:

Often if someone is doing something quite well, they might build a new website that’s nice and shiny, but they haven’t thought of other things, like how people are going to actually find it or what content they’re going to see when they get there.

It comes in all shapes and sizes: it can be solving a problem from ‘ where is all the hospital linen?’ to ‘ how do we communicate with our patients if we’re a GP practice? ‘ It can be complex but having a strong digital toolkit to draw on like we do at Tadashi, means that we can answer a variety of questions.

What’s specifically different about the Tadashi process in this context?

[CB]: That’s a great question! Digital agencies engaging with people in health is not a brand-new thing — people already do this kind of work and are specialising in it.

In my experience with Otaku Digital, the biggest difference is the consultative process and analytical thinking we bring to the table. It’s more than just a ‘ you fit into package A, B or C ‘ method based on how we’ve dealt with similar clients in the past.

Does that ‘packaging method’ come from the digital industry?

[CB]: In a way, yes. Digital is (in the grand scheme of things) a relatively immature industry when you compare it to other industries like law or accounting. They’re long established, and everyone knows what they’re up against. When you go and see a lawyer it works in a certain way and it’s been like that for a long time.

Digital, however, can still be quite fluid. If you go to five different digital agencies, you’ll likely get five different answers — and their processes will be quite different also. Some have a stronger focus on the creative, while others might be more interested in tech.

My feeling is that the concept of the BA in digital is on the rise. Previously, teams are often structured around someone who is very client-facing or admin focused, like an account or project manager who acts as the interface between the client and the tech people. Whereas now, there seems to be more of a swing towards having someone who can be a product owner, or a BA, who can ask bigger questions and make high level decisions. That’s the kind of approach we’ve been doing at Otaku and we’ve seen great results, and we’ll be doing the same for Tadashi.

Have things changed in digital agencies of late?

[CB]: Definitely. In the early days, I had a lot of experience with agencies that used to be very reactive. Here’s an example I often use: a client would come in and say, ‘We need a website with five pages and it needs to be blue’ and they would go away and build them a website that had five pages and was blue. They’d never really ask them any questions about why:

Why does it need five pages? Why does it need to be blue? Why do you even need a website in the first place? Did you consider all of these other things?

They would never mention the fact that they had seen hundreds of clients come along with similar problems or share the outcomes that brought them value. But now — we’re less reactive and more engaged with the requirements and opportunities.

In the final part of our interview with Chris, we take a look at the Tadashi group and get an insight into Chris’ exciting vision for the brand.

Originally published at https://www.tadashi.com.au on February 21, 2019.