 I was emcee for a conference this morning on the topic of digital transformation and I thought I would check in with you and share the main takeaways from the morning because digital transformation is such an interesting and insightful area that has a lot of impact on a wide variety of areas that you and me are working on all the time. So first of all, to set the context of the morning, I came across three statistics that I thought were interesting. Number one is there has been a 54% increase in the number of daily active users post COVID using teams. It is now at 115 million daily active users. And it's interesting when you put that number, like when you hear that number, this is a technology that wasn't in existence a couple of years ago. And now we're at that number daily active users. The second thing is that 76% of businesses are planning long term IT changes as a result of COVID-19. So therefore, they have it that we have found ourselves into being able to work remotely and all of these cultural aspects of the way in which we work, many of them are here to stay and businesses are investing to be able to facilitate that long term when it comes to employment, when it comes to sales, relationship, development and so on. And the third one is that 91% of businesses are engaged in some form of digital initiative. Now, I have to say, I actually thought it was higher than that to think that one in 10 businesses isn't was actually quite surprising to me. But anyway, there were the three, the three statistics that I came across to set the context, then Dr. Orle Flynn opened the morning officially. She is the president of GMIT and absolutely phenomenal lady. She could lead a nation. And you know what? Maybe someday she will. But she was talking about particularly the digital services and the Digital Markets Act, which is designed to give a level playing field right across the European Union. But also, of course, we look at the rights and responsibilities of people who have data, store data, enabling a fair e-commerce environment and so on and so on like that. So she set the very much, you know, the the supranational scene for us as we moved into the morning. Then we had Aidan Keycoin from Paddy Power Bed Fair. And I can summarize what Aidan said in one powerful, impactful line that if we could do this amazingly, we would be able to do so much better with our marketing resources. And he said, maximize the reach and minimize the waste. That's what's to it. And of course, with digital, we are in so much more of a capability of doing that because we're able to track, we're able to track spend, we're able to track results, of course. But also we're able to track the leading indicators that get us there, whether it is A.B. testing about whether an ad is working or which ad is working, being able to target the information, being able to look at the predictive analytics around retention and so on like that. So that's all that's to it is maximize the reach and minimize the waste. But and while easier said than done, it certainly does give a very clear guideline of what one does need to do. Then we had Valerie McTigert from IT Sligo. Really interesting research that Valerie has done. And one particular thing she pointed out is digital transformation is not new. Right. We've been talking about this and doing this for quite some time. However, what's what is relatively recently new and something that is making a big difference to us is connectivity. I don't mean internet connectivity. I mean connectivity in between software, in between apps. So when I'm working on a project now, let's say on my laptop, I have it connected to Dropbox. So it's being backed up in real time as a case in point. So she talks a lot about connectivity and how that is something that has really changed, particularly since 2016 and the the explosion, of course, of cloud computing and so on like that. She particularly said the digital transformation is about culture, business model and process. And she really drove home the point that if you have a suboptimal process, that's simply a way in which things happen and you enable that digitally. Well, then you're enabling a suboptimal process, digital or otherwise. So what you need to do is go back and look at all of your processes and see, are they optimal? Do people buy into them? Because she says you're going to find people who just work around them. And also if you need to lead change, bring your people with you by showing them the benefit for them. For example, I can show you a way to do something that will take 10 minutes less to do per day. This is worthwhile doing now that we have a process to do this, let's digitally enable it. But process is the name of the game. Then we also heard from Brie Conroy from Turtulia, a bookshop in Westport. And she shared her business journey with us about how the bookshop began and also how we developed over COVID and how they got online and so on. But I suppose there was just something that really stood out to me about her story. And it's something that we all need to remember both as buyers and as suppliers is she says, you know, every order matters and it does. Every order matters to a small business. Really, every order should matter to every business. But when it comes to where we choose to put our buying dollars, our pounds or euros or whatever currency you might have, it is important to remember that where we make our buying decisions does dramatically have a bigger impact when it comes to buying from a smaller business, particularly, of course, in an environment like now. And just another statistic for you. I was looking at the retail sector before Christmas for a client and I did some economic analysis into this and there was an increase in the search for shop local Ireland, the Google search for that term by 540%. So the thing is that there is the goodwill out there. There is the goodwill to buy local, to buy artisan, to buy sustainable, all these things. But of course, as a business, you also need to make sure that you're online to meet that demand also. Now, Elaine Miles then from the Mayo Local Enterprise Office then shared with us the business supports that are available to companies that want to get online. But, you know, afterwards, interestingly, I had a call with a body in the north of Ireland as well. And then she was similarly telling me just about the various different opportunities that businesses have in Northern Ireland to get business supports in order to get online or whether it might be in different parts of the world, it is important to optimise your e-commerce capability insofar as possible. But what is there in many parts of the world, wherever you might be tuning in from, is the support to do so. And if it's not hard support, a hard financial support, like the local enterprises offer at the moment, well, then there might at least be soft supports where you can get insight and easy plugins and intuitively usable plugins where you can collect, where you can create an e-commerce element to your website. Then after that, then we had Kira. We had Kira Galleher from Microsoft Ireland. Now, very interesting to hear two key things that I learned from Kira. I learned lots, but there's two that I've time to tell you. The first is how Microsoft is now looking at a partnership with other wellness organisations so that they're aware that people can get very fatigued from being in a screen all day. They're very, very aware of that. Of course, that's how we do things these days and naturally enough, Microsoft wants us to continue to use it. So they're realising that in order to offset the fatigue that looking at our screens causes us, they're looking at how to partner now with other wellness organisations to be able to restore some of that back to us. And I think that that's an interesting one to watch. From a very technical, like cool tool perspective, you may have come across STT. Now, I have to say we came across this in our business a while ago. It is just so super helpful, productivity wise and such a great time saver. STT is speech to text. So speech to text, so they're just Google certain tools, just Google STT tools and you come across a variety of them. They transcribe what you're saying in real time. So when I'm in a meeting now in a virtual meeting, I have the STT tool on in the background that's transcribing the notes for me. It just basically transcribes the way that the meeting is going. And then I can now fully focus specifically on the meeting at hand rather than trying to take notes at the same time. So what Kira was telling us is that the way in which this might develop in the future is that Microsoft may be doing this, transcribing the meeting, but also highlighting the calls to action and maybe then moving those into whether it might be a calendar invite, et cetera. So that then you don't just have your notes. You also then have your notes with your call to action so that you can move forward from one meeting to the next as you're probably all doing like I am. Delightfully, gratefully, but at the same time that chance to just check in and what you need to do in between looks like Microsoft will be able to help us out with that soon. And now the last speaker that we had then was Brian Hanley from Emergent. Brilliant guy, absolutely brilliant guy, brilliant business, brilliant everything. But I want to share three key things that he mentioned. Number one is that he said, it's really important to deliver value early and often, but what, and he specifically said these words now. So it's important. He said, the way in which you need to think about that is how can we, he said, that's how to start the conversation with your team. How can we deliver value early and often? But he says, you need to define what is value, what is early, what is often. In addition, he also said that it's very important to visualize the work to be done like on a Kanban board. We use Trello, for example, on that. We also use mind maps as well so that we can visualize all that's going on. That's my interpretation of Brian. Brian could give you a much more upskill version. And then he also talks about experimentation. He said, whatever ideas you come up with, get out of the building. In other words, metaphorically, of course, is go out and test these against the market to see whether these ideas are worth pursuing. And then he said, it's so important to ask, are we building the right product and are we building the product right? Last thing just to mention then is GMIT. Mayo Local Enterprise and Mayo Council were behind, behind this entire thing. Norian Henry, Janine McGinn, and also Laura Heckerty did an amazing job and make it all happen. And also check out all of the courses that GMIT have to build your digital transformation and really and truly, brilliant day.