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Movers and shakers: Simon Kennedy is new CIO at Air New Zealand

Movers and shakers: Simon Kennedy is new CIO at Air New Zealand

Neville Richardson who is moving to Gallagher Group

Simon Kennedy is now the CIO at Air New Zealand, following nearly eight years at The Warehouse Group, most recently as Group CIO.

Kennedy worked across the globe as a consultant, focusing on the retail sector. After completing his degree in modern history and economics at the University of Oxford, Kennedy became a management consultant, working with Accenture and at Ernst & Young.

He also worked at another consulting group, Kurt Salmon Associates, before joining Reliance, a conglomerate headquartered in India.

He then moved to New Zealand, joining Warehouse Stationery in a strategy delivery role before taking on his first CIO role for the wider Group. Currently, Kennedy is as an advisory board member to the Strategic CIO Programme at the University of Auckland Business School as well as to the Masters in Business Analytics programme at Massey University.

Related reading: Leadership for learning: Simon Kennedy talks about being an academic advisor, mentor and advocate for retail as a career

Another new CIO appointment is that of Neville Richardson who is moving to Gallagher Group, following more than three years as Group IT Manager at Kotahi Logistics.

Richardson is one of the ICT leaders featured in the 2017 CIO100, the annual report on the top CIOs, CTOs and CDOs in New Zealand. His previous roles included CIO at Sealord Group and Les Mills International. He also teaches the IT Service Management component of the AUT MBA programme.

Chris Pope is leaving Air New Zealand after three-and-a-half years as Strategic Programme Manager, and six years as the PMO Manager, Group IT. He will return to business consultancy, focusing on business transformation and leading large organisational change.

Related reading: Chris Pope: Church organiser to ICT leader

Basil Botoulas is now vice president sales operations and chief strategy officer at Hitachi Vantara.

Auckland based cloud software company, Exsalerate, wins the Xero Development Award for EIt, a customer relationship management system which integrates with Xero accounting software.

CEO Steve Bonnici started developing the application four years ago when he could not find a CRM system that was easy to use and affordable that met the needs of his own business, Urgent Couriers.  

Bonnici says the award was for the app’s new account management dashboard (AMD) along with, the ability to create Xero invoices and track Xero quotes. Exsalerate headed off 37 other entries from around the world to take the award.

“Businesses told us they were spending a fortune on acquisition but struggling to keep their existing customers and needed a way to prevent churn proactively,” says Bonnici.

He says the AMD “is the missing piece of the puzzle for most CRM systems - a tool that provides account managers with a snapshot of all customers in their portfolios.”

Bonnici plans more developments for the app including artificial intelligence that will automatically display clients that have stopped spending or failed to spend when expected to, along with automated ranking of clients based on predetermined spend thresholds.

Credit: Image: Dreamstime

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Tags xeroAir New ZealandMBAAuckland University of Technologycustomer focusautGallagher GroupCIO100lifelong learningHitachi VantaraExsaleratecontinous learning

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