The need for digital-savvy graduates who can collaborate in digital ways, across dispersed teams, to create + support ICT solutions that positively enhance our lives, has never been stronger. But are Unis turning out graduates with the right skills, ready to collaborate in diverse teams?

As someone who'd originally trained as an Allied Health professional, but took a sideways turn into a technology career, I've had a long-held interest with seeing how well graduates emerge from their studies with the right levels of digital literacy to help boost their career and productivity. We saw some interesting results in the 2015 Central Coast Startup Weekend, with local Uni of Newcastle students jumping at the chance to participate in a local hackathon in Gosford, travelling down from Newcastle to participate.

For 2016, I've decided to build on that by running a dedicated hackathon at the University of Newcastle that combines ICT, Design, Business and Health students into a cross-disciplinary event that we've called Hacking HealthTech. With two 2015 ICT graduates from UoN taking up UX and Software Engineering roles at Atlassian, fresh into their post-IPO journey on the NASDAQ, it seems like a great time to expose more people to contemporary platforms that support great teamwork. With Atlassian now running on NASDAQ with the TEAM ticker, we think they're a great fit as event partners. 

In many of our consulting engagements, we see time and again how constrained team productivity has become by reliance on email, or overly diverse/poorly integrated tools. That becomes compounded when driven by management staff with limited digital literacy - an understanding of how great software is designed, built, deployed and sustained. That was abundantly evident when we participated in HealthXLs "Hacking Ageing" Hackathon in mid 2015. Agency stakeholders in the room were blown away by the cycle times that became possible with digitally literate cross-disciplinary teams. Winners of that event were then taken to Austria to pitch on the world stage.

It's time to till the soil, sow the seeds and add some sunshine to create the next generation of health technology entrepreneurs as part of our own #ideasboom focus for the Hunter and Central Coast regions.

Our 2016 Hacking HealthTech event will run on 15-17April, 2016, with tickets available from Eventbrite and event details managed on DevPost at http://2016-hacking-healthtech-uon.devpost.com. The event is designed to draw together UoN Students from ICT, Design, Business and Health, with input from Clinicians, Carers + Consumers to tackle regional health problems with targeted use of technology. It should be an immersive event for all involved, with a 54hr timeframe providing a compressed challenge to deliver their first generation concepts and prototypes in a deep-dive learning experience that balances teamwork, time management, digital collaboration skills and clinically relevant technology.

Laughing Mind is situated in the midst of an emergent local government monolith with the planned merger of Gosford and Wyong Councils - their combined impact will make them the largest peri-urban local government agency in NSW. With the need for Digital Literacy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship skills never more pressing in Australia, we decided to make our submission to the local government boundary review a call to action for deeper engagement on these critical enablers for new economy players as part of the #ideasboom.

Ensure your local council has someone on board who gets why these are important skills and competencies, if you want to catalyse the next generation of successful local ventures.

Here's some reasons why:
http://www.cio.com.au/article/555917/rise-digital-board-director/ 
http://www.smartcompany.com.au/technology/48850-why-boards-now-want-tech-savvy-directors/

Atlassian have been doing a lot of work lately on their HipChat platform, with some great integrations starting to appear in their Hipchat Connect platform, highlighted with several compelling examples listed in http://blogs.atlassian.com/2015/12/get-powerful-integration-experience-hipchat-connect/.  

If you think HipChat is just about being a competitor IM (Instant Messaging) platform to Slack, you'd better look again. It provides one of the fastest ways of creating a sense-making and service delivery perimeter for your business that we've seen, helping you to:

1. Sense: what's happening at the perimeter of your business or business systems with targeted Alerts + Notifications from all sorts of monitoring agents, passing those alerts straight into HipChat
2. Structure: By sending alerts straight into HipChat, your teams can quickly discuss the issue or alert in real time and determine a plan of action;
3. Respond: Integrations are being structured within HipChat to minimise Context switching (changing between platforms) which allow you to respond to issues in faster cycle times than you'll have experienced before.

It's a great way of closing the gap between your business and customers, providing you with new capacity to Sense|Structure|Respond in nimble ways. We're excited by the direction they're headed, with clearly more to come in 2016.

Now's the time to be asking: How will you use + integrate Chat in your service delivery in 2016?

We often use a Maturity Model approach to developing new workforce digital literacy - the use of Chat as a Business Operations platform for your business and the growth pathways that lay before you are covered very nicely by Atlassian in this brief adoption guide article: ​http://blogs.atlassian.com/2016/01/what-is-chatops-adoption-guide/

Want to know how Atlassian use the ChatOps model internally for incident management? They wrote about that too, in https://blog.hipchat.com/2016/02/08/inside-atlassian-how-it-and-sre-use-chatops-to-run-incident-management/

Need an Atlassian Expert hand to help you along the pathway? We're here to help.