Analogue to Agile: The Certis Transformation Pathway
08 July 2025
Written by Brett Pickens, Chief Executive, Australia
For many legacy organisations, digital transformation is spoken about more than it is executed. But at Certis Australia, we are deep in the execution phase shifting from traditional operational models to a future-ready enterprise built around data, intelligence, and people. Our journey aligns closely with what experts agree is required to move from analog to agile: strong leadership, meaningful investment, a culture of empowerment, and targeted innovation that adds tangible, measurable, real world value.
1. Leading with Vision and Purpose
Every transformation starts with leadership. At Certis Australia, over the last 18 months we have established a leadership team that brings clarity of purpose and decisiveness to a rapidly evolving landscape. Our goal has never been to adopt technology for its own sake, but to redefine how we serve our customers, safeguard critical infrastructure, and empower our people on the ground.
We recognised early that transformation had to be both strategic and cultural. It’s not just about tools, it’s about reshaping the way people think about their roles, the data they use, and how value is created. It’s also about ensuring alignment between technology and real-world frontline outcomes. This structural change wasn’t about hierarchy it was about proximity to the customer, responsiveness to operational realities, and alignment with our transformation agenda. It gave our frontline teams a clearer voice, our clients a direct strategic partner, and our business the ability to translate enterprise-level vision into site-level action. The result, a three fold improvement in our eNPS score over the last 24 months and a number of former Certis team members like Christina Rose, Robyn Wonser and Asher Batty returning to the new Certis excited by our journey.
2. Infrastructure as the Transformation Enabler
To enable real transformation, we’ve made a foundational investment in our systems architecture through a program called Vivace. Vivace is more than just a systems upgrade. It’s a whole-of-business replatforming effort, effectively a new digital backbone for Certis Australia.
Vivace unifies operational systems, simplifies data access, and creates the interoperability required to support automation and AI. It is the infrastructure that ensures we can scale our services, drive down manual effort, and deploy customer-facing technologies like Mozart with confidence and speed.
This kind of investment is often underestimated and it’s not hard to see why. For many organisations, foundational infrastructure isn’t visible. It doesn’t create instant ROI, it’s complex to implement, and it rarely earns the spotlight in a boardroom presentation. The pressure to show short-term results often leads businesses to jump straight to shiny, client-facing technologies AI dashboards, automation pilots, mobile apps without first addressing the outdated systems, fragmented data, and manual processes beneath them.
It’s a shortcut that feels faster but ultimately slows everything down.
At Certis Australia, we took a different approach. We knew that in order to deploy AI, scale automation and deliver consistent value to our clients, we needed a robust digital backbone. That’s what Vivace is delivering the infrastructure that enables transformation not just today, but sustainably over the next decade.
3. Empowering Our People with Technology and Purpose
Technology is only as effective as the people who use it. That’s why a core element of our transformation is focused on workforce empowerment. We’re not replacing our people with technology, we’re enhancing their impact.
Our goal is ambitious and clear: to have more than 3,000 Certis team members across the country engaging with and being enabled by AI by the end of the year.
Some of that enablement may be invisible. AI quietly working in the background to simplify workflows, reduce friction, and remove repetitive tasks. In other areas, AI will directly reshape how we work. It may be how we recruit, onboard, train, and develop our people, how we enable flexibility in the workplace or how we enhance our operating environment with real time information making those experiences faster, smarter, and more personalised.
Why does this matter? Because empowering every member of our team doesn’t just improve efficiency it increases workplace engagement, strengthens client outcomes, and drives long-term value across both the workforce and the environments we operate in. AI is not a destination. It’s a force multiplier and we’re putting it in the hands of our people to help them lead the future, not just react to it.
A practical example is Charlie, our voice AI agent. Charlie is being deployed at our National Operations Centre to manage frontline check-ins, check-outs, and welfare checks. It ensures that team members are safe, accounted for, and supported, especially in dispersed and remote environments.
This is just one example of how AI is being used not to reduce human connection, but to reinforce it increasing our organisational scale while freeing up team members to focus on higher-value interactions and smarter decision-making. At the same time, we are deploying technology in a way that is easy to consume, simple to engage with, and designed to deliver real value from day one. Whether it’s voice AI supporting frontline operations or intelligent systems streamlining onboarding and training, every tool we introduce is designed to be fully integrated and built with the end-user in mind making their job easier, safer, and more impactful.
4. Delivering Client Value Through Innovation
Customer-facing innovation sits at the heart of our transformation, and Mozart is our clearest expression of that ambition. Built for Australia and developed through deep co-creation with critical infrastructure partners, Mozart is our orchestration platform with a proven 10-year track record of enterprise-level deployments.
Mozart integrates access control, CCTV, incident management, compliance tracking, and workforce coordination into a single intelligent platform. It enables clients to respond faster, reduce risk, and comply with complex regulatory frameworks like the Security of Critical Infrastructure (SOCI) Act.
More than a tech layer, Mozart represents a different operating model one that gives clients real-time command of their environment and empowers them to make informed, data-driven decisions. But the deployment of customer-facing technology at this level comes with important strategic considerations.
The value lies in four key areas:
- Operational clarity — a unified view of assets, risks, and performance across sites.
- Decision velocity — faster, more informed choices with real-time data at hand.
- Regulatory alignment — automation and tracking of compliance obligations such as SOCI, without administrative overload.
- Significant cost efficiency at scale — smarter deployment of resources, reduced duplication, and increased service resilience.
However, to realise these benefits, you must also address key risks:
- User adoption — even the best platforms fail if they’re not intuitive and easy to use. That’s why Mozart is built to be operationally fluent designed by operators, for operators and around the needs of those who rely on it daily.
- Change saturation — deploying tech without overloading frontline or operational staff requires careful sequencing, clear communication, and hands-on training.
- Cyber resilience — with increased connectivity comes increased exposure. We’ve embedded security by design, including full penetration testing and live performance validation with critical infrastructure partners.
- Interoperability — a new platform must work with what already exists. Mozart’s integration capabilities ensure it complements, rather than competes with, clients’ existing systems.
When executed well, customer-facing technologies like Mozart don’t just modernise a function — they transform how value is created and experienced across the entire security ecosystem.
5. Execution with Discipline and Speed
Transformation doesn’t happen in theory it happens in operational detail, under pressure, with tight deadlines and high expectations. At Certis Australia, we’ve focused on disciplined execution: agile pilots, rapid feedback loops, and continuous iteration. We’re not afraid to change direction when the data demands it or pivot based on what we learn in the field. That mindset responsive, reflective, and action-oriented is what sets our transformation apart. Our agility is key to our resilience, enabling us to deliver outcomes in real time while staying aligned to a long-term strategic vision.
This includes standing up our AI use cases quickly, investing in cyber-readiness, and embedding design thinking into how we scope and scale new initiatives. We’ve created internal alignment between our operational, technology, and commercial teams so that transformation is not an overlay but an embedded function.
A Blueprint for Modern Security Operations
What we’re building at Certis Australia is more than an internal capability. It’s a new model for how modern security and enterprise level partners can operate in a post-digital environment. A model where data enables rather than inhibits, frontline teams are empowered, and AI works alongside humans to deliver real-world results.
I am so proud of how far we’ve come and equally clear-eyed about the road ahead. Transformation is never one-and-done. But with the right infrastructure, leadership, and culture, it becomes a continuous capability. One that positions us and our clients to thrive.
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