Transformation never ends

‘Digital transformation’ is one of the most grandiose phrases in business and, according to Tom Loader, one of the most misleading. It implies a destination, a finish line, a moment when the work is done. Tom has spent eight years at Multiplex proving the opposite. Change is slow, and it’s deliberately slow because you want something to last. 

As Group Director of Digital Transformation, he oversees four parallel workstreams: technology, data analytics, AI, and digital skills, across 2,500 people in Australia, Canada, and the UK. An architect by background, he came to the role convinced that technology was never the hard part. It was listening. Sitting inside each business unit, asking ‘why’ until he reached the root cause, and building change around real problems rather than an off-the-shelf vision.

From the early work of rationalising shadow IT, through seven years of connecting core systems into a single trustworthy data environment, to a Microsoft Copilot rollout now running at 92% utilisation, Tom’s story is one of iterative change. But the measure Tom keeps returning to isn’t speed. It’s the shift from efficiency to effectiveness – from doing things faster to helping people become the best version of themselves at work. That, he argues, is where transformation actually begins.