REA Group chief information officer Nigel Dalton will be a speaker at this year’s Property Portal Watch Conference in Madrid, 27-30 September at the NH Collection Eurobuilding.
Dalton’s topic will cover emerging technologies including Virtual Reality (VR) Augmented Reality (AR) and supporting tech like machine learning and robots.
As yet the title of the presentation is a work in progress, however Dalton says he’s tossing up between “Mars, Cars, Stars and VR – surviving the new media era” and “Mars, Cars, Stars and VR – the world of property and its next media platforms”.
With over 25 years of IT-related experience across multi-nationals and start-ups Dalton takes pride in being a champion for the engineering and innovation culture at REA Group.
He says Australia’s number one property portal has embraced lean and agile ways of working like no other organisation he knows of in the world – from the CEO on down.
“People outside of software development are working in a daily rhythm, talking face to face at boards that transparently show the work being done for customers,” he enthuses.
“I am proud to say I’m getting to have an impact on that radical agility, as a coach and advisor to teams and executive colleagues alike.”
Dalton who joined the company in 2007, adds its not until he chats with people in more traditional sectors of the economy that he realises how radically digital REA Group has become, and how comfortable the team is with life at this scale and speed.
“Getting comfortable with working at extreme rates of change, in multi-disciplinary teams, in a daily rhythm took REA a few years – I had the joy of inheriting a high performing IT group in 2012, to whom a billion page views a month for a website is a daily ‘situation normal’.”
According to Dalton it’s REA Group customers who are driving the company’s excellence, in particular when it come to providing services and products on mobile technologies.
“We’re investing a lot in understanding how to manage large sets of disparate data streams to re-imagine the consumer experience for people seeking property to rent or buy,” he says.
“The latter is somewhat ‘big data-ish’, and there are many technologies to track in that space.”
Prior to joining REA Group Dalton worked as General Manager of Information Technology for travel publisher Lonely Planet where he became Deputy Director of Digital (web and mobile businesses) in 2010.
He also co-founded a consultancy, Luna Tractor, to help organisations apply systems thinking, lean and agile software development techniques to all aspects of business and held roles with AXA Australia, online human resource startup ePredix in the USA (now owned by SHL), as well as Silicon Systems and Mitsubishi Electric in New Zealand.
Hear Nigel Dalton speak!
Register now for the Property Portal Watch Conference in Madrid.
