Abtrac CEO Edward O’Leary gives his experienced thoughts on managing in the information age

Coming through immigration after a trans-Tasman flight, I stepped up to the facial scanner and got quite a surprise to hear the machine say, “You’ve put on a little weight Ed. Watch what you eat when you’re away next time.”

Ok. Ok. That’s a joke. It’s not true.

But this is. In a Melbourne café I overheard a manager talking to a supervisor. “I see Vanessa is going to Europe for a hen’s party late next month. Has she applied for annual leave?”

“No. I didn’t even know. How did you know?”

“The company has HR go through everyone’s Facebook each week and we get a report.”

The best time is now!

You’ll be hard put to find a news site today that doesn’t have a bad forecast for the global economy. There’s plenty of talk about with Brexit, and the US/China trade war. Even locally we read that the majority of people in our lovely lands are inexorably falling behind economically. “The decline of the middle classes.” Indeed we probably all know people who are struggling right now, trying to keep up, trying to live within tight financial constraints.

Some people get to a certain age and one day they look in the mirror, or maybe they try on their favourite shirt, and they wonder, “What happened?”. What happened to that well ripped body.

The six pack is morphing into one squidgy ab. And the pecs are slowly reaching down for our belly button. The problem is, some people ‘let things go a little’. This doesn’t happen to everyone. But it does happen.

Like middle aged spread in some of us, at a certain age, some businesses go the same way. The founding directors, even though it’s still their business, ‘let things go a little’. I see it all the time. Businesses get busy. Founding directors get busy. And things slip passed them that wouldn’t have got through a few years earlier.

Everybody knows where you’re most likely to be told “Say ahhhhh”. For a routine medical check-up you go to the doctor. They’ll use tools to measure your temperature, check blood pressure, listen to your heart and check your lungs. The big ice-cream stick comes out and you’ll be told “Say ahhhhh”. Doctors always start by properly checking out our body’s vital signs. Everything else depends on them working properly.


They actively go through a standard series of measurements and observations. Only then can they give feedback and advise on any actions that need to be taken.

Businesses are in need of routine check-ups just as people are. It’s part of business management. And whatever the scale of your business, getting the right stuff, the stuff your business needs to have working properly, comes down to one thing, understanding the current condition.

This means business information systems to help you measure, and thus manage, the business. So what to measure.

Talking with a prospective client, a director’s big concern was they were writing off too much each month. Their initial email said “Our business is leaking time”. After some discussion I suggested they meet routinely and have staff agree on expectations of how long each piece of work should take. Things will then more likely be done within agreed times and thus agreed client budgets. This could plug the leaks and reduce their write offs.