Jemma Iles appointment as CEO of healthcare software group Olinqua breaks a number of moulds in the corporate world of technology commercialisation.
As a female taking on a business that has emerged from startup and is in the process of scaling up, Ms Iles is in rare company.
Perhaps more unusually, Olinqua is a Melbourne-based business with a national presence and healthcare has no particular strength as a sector in Perth. Yet, she won the role which she is delivering from her Western Australian home base.
Finally, and perhaps more intriguingly, Ms Iles has taken on the chief executive role from an emerging part of the C-suite; that of innovation and transformation.
“I started my innovation journey at the City of Canning, when I was appointed chief innovation officer,” she said.
That was 2017 and local government was being pushed the national Smart Cities Plan to be more productive and accessible to attract, retain and develop increasingly mobile talent and organisations, encouraging them to innovate, create jobs and support growth.
Ms Iles held that role for three years and was involved in working with staff and stakeholders to educate about then the benefits of change and make them feel confident in embracing it.
In 2020, during the earliest part of the Covid pandemic she worked with Professor Fiona Wood on the WA Innovation Hub, a community-focused platform to channel ideas and expertise into effective solutions to new problems.
“There was a strong desire for people to contribute, from making PPE to hand sanitiser,” she said.
In August 2020 she became South Metropolitan Health Service executive director transformation, a role that came with 70 projects in its pipeline and clearly provides a strong background in a sector Olinqua, with around 100 hospitals as clients, is devoted to.
Part of her role was help redirect patients away from emergency to reduce ambulance ramping.
“That was an exciting project to be involved in,” she said.
“It is now scaling out statewide.”
A year later Ms Iles went back to local government as City of Cockburn's executive people experience and transformation.
She has also been Global Innovation Management Institute global innovation ambassador, chaired Curtin University’s discipline advisory panel for innovation, entrepreneurship, strategy and international business, and a founding international council member for the Global Council For Innovative Organisations.
She joined Olinqua at the start of the year in a human resources role, reflecting her original executive background, before being appointed chief executive last month.
“I love running a business,” she said.
“I have always enjoyed leadership roles.
“I am a naturally curious person, so I love to know how a business works and what makes it tick.”
Olinqua is a health-focused brand in the portfolio of the platform’s owner Omnesse. A sister company 4Zero focuses on agriculture, mining and defence.
Ms Iles believes that Oliniqua’s structure makes it very comfortable to have a chief executive stationed outside of head office. More than a quarter of Olinqua’s 40 staff reside in WA.
“This business was built on a remote-first mindset,” she said.
“We are very flexible and collaborative, and we utilise collaborative tools.
“However, I don’t underestimate the value of face to face,” she adds, pointing out that three of her key executives are based in WA.
Olinqua software is an enterprise-level communication and collaboration system which can be connected to existing platforms and equipment with a hospital to manage people and assets more efficiently.
Ms Iles specifically highlights Olinqua as a solution provider to one of the big issues in major hospitals, geo-locating experts where they are most needed.
“Hunting down someone in hospital is very difficult,” she said.
“We are automating that system and making it easier to find people.”
The same issues extends to equipment, with the internet-of-things making it easier to track and find devices.
Olinqua claims it can do this while working with legacy systems employed in the hospital.
