Back in the year 2000 the conference title "global ecology and information technology" would have sounded like an improbable combination of computer and environmental concerns.
But in the era of endemic social networking, most people are now aware that the way we express ourselves online and particularly the way we identify ourselves is part of a global ecosystem where corporate entities such as Facebook and Google wield considerable power.
New data-rich primary-industry organisation OSPRI, formed by the amalgamation of National Animal Identification and Tracing (Nait) and the Animal Health Board (AHB) is seeking senior executives, including a chief information officer.
The CIO will be in charge of formulating an information strategy that will use the huge resources of data on 80,000 farms, their animals and their owners to the benefit of those owners and other stakeholders in the agricultural sector.
Warren Shera, CIO of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, is faced with the challenging task of reconciling the ICT needs of four departments, which bring very different established needs, priorities and styles of operation to the mix.
Since John Emerson was appointed global CIO of Tait Communications, last October, he has put a global information strategy in place and the company is progressing under his charge in selecting a new ERP system, expected to be chosen by June.
An electronic document management system and the salesforce.com cloud sales support system, will be the mainstays of the strategy. “We need to standardise globally, with global cloud-based applications,” he says.
Statistics NZ expects up to 35 percent of forms – about two million - will be submitted online tonight.
If this total is achieved, it will beat the 28 percent achieved by the Australian census in 2011.
Mobile devices supplied by Vodafone to 6500 police are expected to keep officers on the front line for more of their working hours.
Henrietta Hall is still very much in ICT, but she has “morphed”, she says, from a full-time CIO-equivalent position with the Christchurch Press and subsequently Independent Newspapers, to working with a number of clients on shorter-term assignments, with a preference for not-for-profit organisations and the creative sector.
She has been in consultancy mode for the past “nine or 10 years”.
After more than five years with the National and ANZ banks in ICT-related roles, Victor Vae'au decided, in 2007, to "round out" his career with some public-service experience. He applied for an applications development post in the NZ Defence Force and was told of an opportunity as operations manager.
The Ministry of Social Development will appoint a chief security information officer following the second phase of the Deloitte report on its security, says chief executive Brendan Boyle.
“I am creating a new senior management position of chief information security officer to support the implementation of all of the recommendations from the two Deloitte reports.
Moving out of the CIO role into broader management can be a challenging, even at times "frightening" experience, says Glenn Patrick, for the past four years chief operating officer retail at the BNZ Bank. But it's a role that is "exciting" and gets him a lot closer to the customers than working in the IT space did.
The SBS Bank has become an early user of the Wynyard Group’s Anti-Money Laundering solution, which is delivered through a secure hosted service and will allow the bank to analyse transactions to help detect and prevent money laundering and the financing of terrorism.
The Wynyard analytics service will ready SBS to satisfy the requirements of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 (AML/CFT Act), due to come into effect in New Zealand on 30 June 2013.
Wellington City Council is advertising for a head of technology and information (HTI) to take overall charge of managing its ICT systems and “further development of the technology-based infrastructure”.
However, the ICT team itself could be due for further restructuring.
Local ICT lobby group NZRise attracted some high-powered speakers from all sides of the government ICT procurement process to a seminar last month.
The aim is to improve communication and further evolve procurement processes, particularly to be fairer to potential providers based in New Zealand. The latter often claim they come off badly under the present system in competition with international vendors and suggest that with more work awarded overseas and locked up in rigid long-term contracts for “panels” of approved suppliers, local resources of expertise may in time be, in one speaker’s words, “gutted”.
Four CIO or equivalent positions are likely to be disestablished as part of the creation of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE).
Of the agencies make up the recently formed ministry, four had CIO-type positions, says MBIE spokeswoman Jane McSweeney.
Government CIO Colin MacDonald has added yet another string to his bow; he has joined the board of directors of the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information, an Australia/NZ government, industry and research joint venture in spatial technologies.
The CRCSI sees such technologies making a significant contribution to the economies of Australia and New Zealand. One of its members is Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), where MacDonald was chief executive before taking up his present position as GCIO and chief executive of the Department of Internal Affairs.