CIO Leadership Live Australia with Milad Kruze, Executive General Manager – IT, The Salvation Army

Cathy O’Sullivan  00:06
Hello and welcome to CIO Leadership Live Australia. I’m Cathy O’Sullivan, editorial director for Foundry in Australia and New Zealand. And today, my guest is Milad Kruze, who is the Executive General Manager for IT at the Salvation Army, and he’s also one of our CIO50 alumni. Hello Milad, happy 2025 hope the new year is off to a good start for you.
 
Milad Kruze  00:32
Hello Cathy, and thanks for having me. And yes, we’re off to a flying start here in 2025.
 
Cathy O’Sullivan  00:39
Excellent, excellent. So look, one of my favorite questions to ask CIOs is about their origin story and how they got their start in tech. So can you share with us your journey and how you got your start and what have been some of the highlights of your career so far?
 
Milad Kruze  00:56
Yeah, absolutely. You know, it was about sort of 20 odd years ago now so it’s been a it’s been a while, but I came fresh out of uni, and I did a Bachelor of Information Technology, and I got right into my first formal job as a production control operator for a small company in Sydney and they did end of day processing and transactions for credit unions and banks. Sounds really exciting, right? I questioned my career options a few times as I was in that role, and it was shift work, and it was behind screens and all that sort of stuff, and I didn’t know much about the industry to go and search for other roles that I could do. And I quickly learned about sort of front facing roles and working with people. And I actually moved to Canberra and took up a service desk role, and I loved it. I love the having the ability to help people, and I sort of had this tool of trade that could do that. And I really enjoyed putting, you know, a smile on everyone’s face when I was able to help them, and that kind of started my career in it went from there and sort of went into more consulting roles, and then slowly started to manage sort of technology for small businesses. And because I was in Canberra, I naturally got into a lot of government work, and that led me to the Australian Defence Force, which ended up leading the systems engineering team for the Royal Australian Navy. And we took care of all the IT systems and all the Navy ships and ports across Australia. And that was a really cool gig. I got to exercise a few different skills there. And one day, someone asked me to do project management and lead a project. And I knew nothing about projects other than this buzzword of PRINCE2 and people going on the course. And it was a real juncture for me to figure out whether I stayed sort of in that technical world or move into management. And I decided to, yeah, sure, you know, start moving into sort of that project management realm a little bit, and that started to go to sort of more consulting areas and working for a systems integrator at the time, and the word, sort of transformation and cloud was born. So we’re very much at the forefront of working with multiple organisations across Australia, and I had the opportunity to see how well organizations did things and how other organisations didn’t. And, you know, even doing the same projects, it was easier sometimes to do it for 10,000 people than it was for 200 people. So I got real exposures to different industries, and then I decided to go out on my own, and I wanted to be the customer, because I was working with customers for so much and I’m like, well, let’s go and be the customer and do it inside organisations. And did more transformation work. Moved to Melbourne, and did some work there, around bringing organisations together, and these sort of multi year transformations, deploying productivity tools and changing the way businesses operate, and sort of landed into the CIO role. So, and I think everything through my career has kind of had a tech and mission connection there somewhere. And, you know, Tech for Good and purposeful stuff. So, yeah, it’s, it’s led me to the Salvos, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.
 
Cathy O’Sullivan  04:25
So clearly helping people is something that’s a key driver for you, from those Help Desk days right through to the Defence Force, and now, as you say at the Salvation Army. And look, the Salvation Army is a household name for many, many households in Australia and New Zealand. But for anyone who’s listening who doesn’t know what the Sallies do, can you give us an overview of the organization and what you and the team are responsible for?
 
Milad Kruze  04:52
Absolutely, it’s, you know, depending on who you ask, I think you’ll get a different answer. You know, a lot of people know us for our famous Salvo stores. You know, we’ve got 400 retail stores across the country, but it’s so much broader than that. And I didn’t even know that before joining the Salvation Army, and even little over two and a half years now, I’m still learning about things that we do. We’re a Christian based organisation. We operate in about 140 countries worldwide, here in Australia, where the largest non for profit, if one of the largest for a lot of the social programs that we offer. So you know, we help everyone every 17 seconds across our social programs, and they range from anything from homelessness and housing support through to family domestic violence, disaster relief, youth services and a wide range of community services as well, such as financial counseling, etc. But we also have an aged care arm within the Salvation Army, employment services as well, and our salvo stores. And in addition to that, the other side of the organisation, we also have churches, so we’re kind of in that multi sectored environment where we run all at different speeds, and it makes things very interesting for the IT department. And what we do is essentially own the technology backbone for the entire organization and bring all those different things together.
 
Cathy O’Sullivan  06:22
So then just digging into that a bit further, you know, with it being such a multi faceted organisation, how do you align your IT strategy with that overall mission and the values of the Salvation Army?
 
Milad Kruze  06:35
It’s, it’s a really good question. And I think when you’re when you’re aligning strategy with mission and values you’ve got to understand what we do first. I spent a lot of my first year just just going on site and seeing different sites and how we do things. And once you’re on site and you and you understand how much of a positive community impact that we can make on a shoestring and what the local challenges are. We very much started our strategy ground up in that way, and sort of met with that 30,000 view very late on. So we very much started with a person centered approach and used, you know, Human Centered Design Thinking methodologies and all that kind of stuff. But really it was around hearing the stories from our front line and our missional areas as to what they do every day. And it’s about, it’s amazing to see, you know, the broad set of things they do do. You know, they’re small business owners, they help community members, they go to parks and help homeless people and have lunches and all those kind of things. So we really needed to be able to connect it in that way. And we came up with a an organisational digital strategy, really, to provide a North Star for the entirety of the organization, which where we needed to move to. And we came up with three key themes that were the focus areas. The first one was around capability excellence and just building that digital muscle for the organisation and the maturity and getting those basics right across the board. The second one was around empowering our frontline. You know, our frontline are the heartbeat of our organisation and what we do, and we needed to be able to provide them with the right tools and services that they could use to be able to do what they do best every single day. And last but not least, is around community connections, and how we connect with communities across Australia, working with all demographics and age groups, we really needed to have a think about, how do communities connect with us, and how can they connect with us in a better way? So when I think of our strategy and how connected we are to the mission and values of TSA and also our organisational strategy, we made direct connections into each area and really underpin all those different areas as well.
 
Cathy O’Sullivan  09:04
With the background of that digital strategy then, can you just take us througH some of the big projects that you and the team have been driving and how that overall digital journey is tracking?
 
Milad Kruze  09:15
Absolutely, you know, some of the big projects to call out we started to look at really front-of-office projects very quickly on and we were just industry recognised for our contact centre initiative. We have multiple entry points into the Salvation Army. You could imagine. We have many different phone numbers listed, and we wanted to make that experience for communities, whether it was a donation or someone that was in need, to be able to connect this to us seamlessly. And we rolled out a national platform, and we connected all our contact centres together, and we were able to then avoid dropping entire phone queues, which is what we were experiencing with our old platforms, and we just wouldn’t get those people back online, and we didn’t have a way to call them back either. So something as simple as acontact centre initiative that happened right across the Salvation Army really unified us. We’ve also been working on systems and processes effectively. So we, I often call us a 140 year old startup from a tech perspective, only about a six years ago, we came together from two organisations into one. So we have a lot of old and we’ve brought in a lot of new, and we’ve got to tie those things together. So naturally, when you do that, there’s a complexity of systems and processes that you build. So we’ve been really fixing those things and reducing cognitive load for our staff as well, and searching for information and getting things done. And the other thing that we’ve been really focusing on in that community connection space is we’ve got a project called confident connections. And confident connections is about confidently connecting with people. And we work in all sorts of demographics and age groups, as I mentioned, and there’s language and cultural barriers in doing that as well. So we’ve been using AI technology a lot in that space and figuring out, how do we have language translation and how do we reduce cognitive load but increase psychological safety as well for our personnel in some settings, you know, we can have a case worker that might have 64 tabs open up on their screen looking for eligibility criteria and legislation and what we offer and policy and procedures and things like AI and generative AI is just simplifying that so much more so we can connect with empathy. And then we’ve got a whole range of, you know, networking projects and data center projects and really heavy lifting infrastructure type stuff that we’ve needed to connect the organization from that digital backbone perspective.
 
Cathy O’Sullivan  12:04
Now, you mentioned already that your frontline staff are really, you know, the heartbeats of the organisation. So can you tell us about, you know, that role that it has played from, you know, moving from just a support function to really being a strategic partner in that frontline service delivery?
 
Milad Kruze  12:22
Yes, and I think this comes from, you know, the organisation coming together about six years ago, and it has needed to play such an operationally focused role for the organisation to operate. And naturally, you know, we did a lot of those, you know, those hairy projects such as, you know, we could combine seven networks together. We used to be on Lotus Notes, believe it or not, and we’ve moved over to exchange and released a whole heap of productivity tools. And then this was the same time around when COVID hit. So, you know, video conferencing and all those things came into play. But we knew that we needed to be a partner in mission, and we knew we needed to build that front-of-office capability. One of the first things we did was we built a genius bar right in the heart of it, in the in the department here at Blackburn, and that invited customers in, and it provided another channel of a way of connecting with our customers, and also started to change the mindset of it and the organisation of what we did. But we also built a whole new set of capabilities as well within our front office, we built a strategy and transformation function. We’ve doubled down on it, performance planning, we matured our architecture function, and also we’ve invested heavily in our customer experience and emerging tech capability that we now have. So we used to when we used to go on site people, and probably still do, they ask us where we’re from, and we say we’re from it, and they’ll give us the, you know, the run sheet of computer issues and local printer issues. And then once we get over that, we start talking about missional outcomes and improving safety and how we connect with community using technology. And then there’s this great conversation that happens where we can actually drive change and really help Australians, as opposed to waiting for that to come to us and resolving things. So it’s been a it’s been a journey, and we’re still on that journey, but it’s quite rewarding.
 
Cathy O’Sullivan  14:30
Now, the Salvation Army is also really well known for its role in disaster relief, and so tell us about it in that regard, and what your IT transformation has done to improve the overall ability to respond during those big crises?
 
Milad Kruze  14:51
Yeah and they happen more often these days, don’t they, and we have done a fair bit of work in that space. And obviously we’ve got very strong and great leadership in that space too. Here at the Salvos, we’ve got, you know, 20,000 volunteers across the Salvation Army, and we need them at all different places, all at the same time as well. And sort of that digital backbone that we had to build very early on allows us to bring in tools and software and all those things and connect them into our ecosystem, which is quite pivotal. But we’ve also invested in, you know, modernised disaster management software and tools and and we used to do this all out of spreadsheets. You know, we used to manage resources and locations and responses out of Excel. And while Excel is a great tool, it didn’t give us that map of where these things were happening. So we’ve done a lot of work in that space, and I think we’ve we’re continually improving it. We’re this year, we’re particularly focused on, you know, that blended workforce with our volunteers as well, and how we can give them more access to our environment and have them part of the Salvation Army technical environment as well. So, yeah, it’s been an evolving space, but we’ve, we’ve definitely moved the dial on it in the in the last couple of years.
 
Cathy O’Sullivan  16:14
So from Lotus Notes to drowning in spreadsheets, the challenges just keep on coming, I bet. So speaking of challenges then, what have been some of the most significant challenges during the rollout of all of these initiatives, and what steps have you been taking to overcome them?
 
Milad Kruze  16:34
Yeah and, you know, I guess you’re getting a sense of that. You know, 140 year old organisation and these new things coming into play and trying to connect those two things together. You know, one of the one of the biggest challenges we have is that is the sheer size of the organisation, and it brought its broad set of services. You know, how we the technology we build, for example, in our retail Salvo stores, environment through to, you know, housing and homelessness and our churches is very different technology and different needs, and trying to come up with enterprise approaches in meeting those local needs can always be challenging. And you know, gone are the days where you can flick a switch here in headquarters and hope that it goes well with a change stick you follow people with we need to allow a lot of time for, you know, building relationships and partnerships and really understanding what are the business impacts, and then come up with solutions. And sometimes we will come up with a national approach in doing something, but we need to release it at different times when different departments already to make sure that we don’t leave other people behind. And the other part of it is we act much like a federated environment. So if we need to work on an enterprise solution, there are a lot of conversations that need to happen and a lot of trust that needs to be built right across the movement to bring everyone along with the same vision. And overall, you know, if we, if we do it for the for the betterment of TSA, then everybody usually gets on board pretty quickly. But I just say, you know, for an organization that is so spread in different areas, and finding solutions that meets all needs is quite difficult.
 
Cathy O’Sullivan  18:19
And of course, cyber security is a never ending challenge for any CIO regardless, regardless of what organisation you’re in. So tell us about your approach then to cyber security and and I guess, how you maintain confidence from from stakeholders across the organization and managing tech risks?
 
Milad Kruze  18:39
Great question, and it is, you know, cyber security us, like many else, focused on this very much so, and we’ve just completed our three year cyber strategy and refreshing our new one. Now, you know, for us, it’s really about balance as well. You know, we can turn everything on and lock everyone out of everything, just to say that we’re safe. But we are custodians of sensitive information here at the army as well, and we have some areas that high in regulations, and we need to accord to those and meet those needs, particularly with our employment services space holding public information. And look, we’ve, we’ve taken sort of a three tiered approach, which is nothing new to a lot of people, you know, people process and tech, and we knew we needed to start with people. We’ve done a lot of work in the last, you know, 12 or so months, just around cyber awareness and cyber maturity. And we run phishing campaigns every month, and we see those statistics, and we used to be in the double digits when we first started as to who clicked on these emails and provided passwords, and now we’re in single digits, and people don’t do that much at all. So from a cyber awareness point of view, and where we are in total as an organization has come a long way. So. From a processors view. You know, we’re always testing. We’re always running Incident Response tests, penetration tests, we run social engineering tests. Just last year, we impersonated a VIP calling our service desk and wanting to reset passwords, and so we do all that kind of stuff. And it’s amazing by how much you learn from those different environments. And as you probably see as well, it’s rapidly changing. It’s constantly changing. And I think for us just to remain a status quo takes a lot of work. You know, we’re not doing anything too exciting. We’re just trying to keep us safe. And from a technology perspective, we have some great partners we work with around our Threat Intelligence. We’ve got some advanced technologies in place now as well that do those things. So we’re in a place where now it’s about fine tuning those dials and figure out which ones we turn. And this is in lockstep with the board and sort of our audit risk committee and our executives
 
Cathy O’Sullivan  21:04
Now, Milad, you mentioned earlier about that importance of relationship building across the organization, and of course, it being such a diverse organisation, with everyone in churches to in your Op shops to frontline service delivery, A lot of stakeholders there, so when you’re engaging with non technical stakeholders, what kind of things have been helpful for engaging with them and ensuring buy in for those IT initiatives getting them off Lotus Notes and Excel spreadsheets into the new software and things to improve the organisation? What kind of ways have you been engaging with those non-technical stakeholders?
 
Milad Kruze  21:43
Great question, and it all does come back to relationships and partnerships. The Salvation Army in what we do and how we connect with community is very much how we are internally. We’re a highly relational organisation –  people who have been here for a long time in a lot of different areas – but I’d say the simple answer to that is just understand what they go through. And to give you an example, I went out to a site the other day and just to sit down with, you know, the core officer there and understanding how they work and what their challenges are. And they were telling me this story about how they just helped someone get off a park bench in the middle of the park, and they brought them into the building and then helped get them cleaned and fed them, and then sat down with them to talk about, you know, what help they needed, to give them vouchers in terms of food or point them to our Salvo stores for whatever they needed, to providing them other services such as housing and homelessness, right? And then they’ve got to deal with this invoice, you know? So they’ve got this five minutes at their desk to go back and sort of process something that they need to do as part of their day job. And if you understand that context that you need to work within, and what they go through, you start speaking the same language. And once you start speaking the same language, it really gives you a good baseline to talk about, while these are the things that we require from a central point of view to be able to do to make those things go away, and as soon as you start talking about the value of that in terms of their workload, everyone gets on board pretty quickly. But I think from a non technical stakeholder view, we obviously have a lot within the Salvation Army and at all different demographics, and you know that I see that as the CIO role, just as much as the IT department’s to be able to have those conversations and really understand what we do and treat it from an empathetic point of view as well, just like we do with our communities.
 
Cathy O’Sullivan  23:44
And then when it comes to your own team, I mean, how are you building that internal culture in your IT team and getting the best out of everyone and making sure that they feel like they’re contributing and growing in their roles?
 
Milad Kruze  23:57
Yeah, we, I’m blessed to have a great IT department and culture here at TSA, we, you know, we do those, those surveys now and again, and we always, you know, one of the highest departments in terms of our responses, and we’re intentional about what we do and live and breathe, sort of the TSA values we have within the IT department. For the most part, it’s all about empowering and trusting your people. I run very much a fail fast type environment, and that’s not to say we don’t have rigorous controls and processes and all those different things, but it’s a learning and grow environment. We need to be able to do that together. And I try and keep a very professional but home away from home environment as well. And, you know, we’ve got this thing where, you know, we get together every month, virtually across the different areas, and we have the national it meeting, and someone will volunteer to do what we call a person X. And what person X is, is they create a slide deck pretty much of their life. You know, they they share their story about their hobbies and what their interests are and what they used to do before it, and, you know, pictures of their wedding and their adventures and all this kind of stuff. And it creates this cultural inclusion type thing, and it just enriches our culture within IT. So I’ve been amazed by the stories that come through that forum and learning so much about people. And I now know who to go to, from beekeeping to triathlete advice to adventures and, you know, weddings and all that sort of stuff. But you know, the team, you know, I’d like to say they do a lot of work with each other outside of the Salvos as well, and go and volunteer together as well, and go and visit sites and even to ice baths. You know, they have these day i spots together, which I haven’t signed up to yet, but, you know, all that stuff sort of brings the team together, and, you know, just enriches our culture, and we have fun as we’re doing it. So we really try and create that culture where we stick together and we all get to thrive at the same time.
 
Cathy O’Sullivan  26:03
Yeah, sounds like a great culture there. And I love that person X initiative. I might steal that one myself. So look, this feels like an interesting topic, diversity and inclusion to dive into, particularly with what’s going on in other parts of the world right now, there seems to be a push against diversity and inclusion. But look digging into DEI, you know what kind of specific strategies you mentioned there, some of the team culture stuff that you’re doing, but for getting diversity into an organisation, particularly women are in it, which sadly still is is lacking, what kind of strategies have you been looking to implement, and what kind of outcomes have you observed?
 
Milad Kruze  26:45
Yeah, it is lacking, isn’t it, and it’s  when I look at sort of numbers and things like that, some things are still in decline. And I think from a STEM point of view, we need to start with younger generations. And when I think now with new areas in technology such as business intelligence and cyber security and customer experience, it’s allowing more opportunities to come into those different areas. And look from a, I guess, a DEI perspective, I’ll start with, I mean, we were obviously IT departments are culturally diverse to begin with, and just taking and being intentional about that. So, you know, getting together, you know, those food days where everyone brings their own meal from their country and share what that is within the other areas, and sort of, you know, having respect for other people’s cultures and all those things, but particularly to women in it. I think we still lack that. You know, we’re very much intentional about it here within the IT department. In the last year and a half, we’ve been quite intentional with making sure our females in IT attend conferences and part of different forums for women in it. And also we’ve seen an increase in some of our leadership roles and some of the positions that we’ve advertised, and I think particularly for this area, you know, we we often say that, you know, you need to meet 100% of the position description to even apply for the role. And we need to lower that bar and say, you know, if you meet 60% of it, how do you make up the other stuff with the diversity of thought that you bring to the table for the group, and we always are very conscious of those things. We also have a lot of volunteers that come into the Salvation Army and help us. And a statistic that I saw just in November was over 71% of the volunteers that we had coming to it were women. So that was great. And what that does is it just brings that blend into our department and that cultural diversity, but also that gender diversity that we need. So I think we’ve got still a way to go. Still think we need to put in things. I think the industry needs to do more as well. But yeah, it’s a great question, and we constantly need to be aware of it and provide opportunities indeed.
 
Cathy O’Sullivan  29:02
So look, when you reflect back then on your leadership journey at the Salvation Army, how do you think it’s evolved during your time there? And I guess, how do you approach, you know, leading such a diverse organisation?
 
Milad Kruze  29:16
It’s a great question. And you know, TSA is a highly relational organisation. And I often think the different organisations you’re part of, you almost take some of the culture, whether you like it or not. And I must say that, you know, the sort of the dials that I’ve turned up a little bit over the last, you know, two and a half years, little over that I’ve been is definitely being more empowering and being inclusive in a lot of ways, but really understanding what empathy means, and really connecting with empathy and spending time to listen and understand. And you know, working across such a diverse organization, you really need to understand the context to a lot of. Things. So it’s often easy to make decisions or to assume, and I consciously make sure that I don’t. So I take the time to meet with people. I take the time to ensure I empower people and support them in any circumstance. And you know that goes with my team and also colleagues right across the salvos and definitely just being such a mission driven, orientated organization we’re all drawn to that, you know, a lot of the salvos joined the Salvation Army to do that, you know. And I think really bringing that out in people, and making sure that how they can connect their role, whether it’s a database analyst, how does that connect to changing Australia one life at a time? And it’s making those connections and being conscious about doing that.
 
Cathy O’Sullivan  30:51
So you and the team have achieved an awful lot in the last few years. So what’s next, Milad. What are your next major, big goals that you’re climbing into and and how do you plan to sustain that momentum that you’ve created?
 
Milad Kruze  31:08
Yes, the sustaining bit is an interesting one, given we’ve just started 2025 look, but we’ve got a few big initiatives we’re working on this year. We’re setting up our AI practice formally for the first time, which is really exciting for us, and a new capability we’re building. Last year, we were trying to figure out what it was, right so where we’ve got some tools that we’re releasing out, we’re releasing out a virtual buddy tool for everyone within the Salvation Army, and looking into that a little bit more around productivity. But what’s really interesting for us is we’re using AI for that psychological safety and cognitive load as well. So it’s easy to use it for productivity sake, but when you start looking at work, health and safety and how to apply it to those human needs, it gets quite interesting. So we’re continuing down that road, and also we’re looking to bring in some other systems as well, and we’re looking at the role of IT and digital now across the board, and figuring out the role of it again. So we continue providing value and really playing in that front of office space and driving a lot of the technology outcomes. So the Salvation Army, you know, leaders right across the board, are working very closely with the IT department, and we’re trying to navigate what those things look like in terms of governance and investing in the right things at the right time. So our role is kind of shifting again, and from a sustainability point of view, you know, I always ask myself, you know, how do I not burn people out, including myself, because of such a you know, the fast pace. And I just think, you know, if we can continue with a great culture and continue to have fun and be connected to our mission and what we do, it goes a long way. So, you know, just continuing being intentional about those things, and then how we connected the mission of the Salvation Army, ultimately, and that’s that’s the fuel that drives us. So they’re kind of the big things we’re looking into this year. And obviously, you know that from a back office point of view, the systems and processes which I mentioned before, we’re continuously refining the way we work. You know, every dollar that we don’t spend on ourselves goes to changing someone’s life. So we’re always conscious of those things and and it is playing a huge part in that so bring on 2025
 
Cathy O’Sullivan  33:31
Such a worthy mission to have. Milad Kruze, Executive General Manager for IT at the Salvation Army, thank you for such a wonderful conversation.
 
Milad Kruze  33:40
Thank you very much, Cathy, it was great to spend
 

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