Movers and shakers: Mike Foley is now CIO at Instant Finance

Plus: New executive posts for Grant Lyons at LINZ, Marie Boyle at ACG, Nikhil Ravishankar at Vector and Jason Wills at Kadima Solutions

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Mike Foley takes on the inaugural CIO role at Instant Finance. His previous roles include head of information services at Auckland Council and CIO at Watercare.

Grant Lyons is now the commercial lead at Land Information New Zealand (LINZ). Before this, he was on secondment at LINZ as commercial advisor to the Advanced Survey and Title Services (ASaTS), the project to replace Landonline, the system used to manage New Zealand’s survey and title transactions. He came from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment where he also held the acting CIO role and manager, collaborative procurement.

Marie Boyle joins ACG Tertiary & Careers Group as CTO. Before this, she was GM technology at TVNZ. Her previous roles included being a consultant at Techspace and TrustPower; and business solutions manager at Genesis Energy.

Jason Wills is now CEO and founder of Kadima Solutions. The former CIO of Harcourts International is also focusing on delivering keynote and workshop presentations on disruptive marketing and the future of technology across Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

Wills notes how his background as a systems engineer helps him understand technology concepts and gives him the ability to crystal ball gaze into the future to help companies understand the potential of new trends with technology and then how they could be applied to any industry.

At Harcourts, Wills and his team developed the technology strategy that helped make it one of the most successful real estate companies in the world.

During his term, Harcourts was the first real estate company to be featured across Apple’s global web network with a case study showing how they used Apple’s iOS technology to transform their business. Other projects included building a searchable real estate website (1996); utilisation of Google Maps, Google Base, Second Life; and mobilising a workforce of 2000 users with Windows Mobile (2004).

Nikhil Ravishankar will join Vector in February as Chief Digital Officer. The new role will be responsible for managing Vector’s IT function and digital strategy and will work across the group to help shape Vector’s response to disruptive technologies.

He joins Vector from Accenture where he was managing director for NZ operations. Prior to this, he was the head of technology strategy for Spark.

Graham Smith is appointed independent chairman of the board of Xero, following the impending resignation of Chris Liddell as Director and Chairman. Liddell has notified Xero of the need to step down due to his new role as Assistant to the President-Elect of the United States, Donald Trump. Smith is based in the US and has already served as a Xero Director for two years. He also chairs its Audit and Risk Management Committee. Smith also serves as a Board Director at Citrix, Splunk, MINDBODY and BlackLine.

ServiceNow is acquiring DxContinuum, a Silicon Valley-based, machine-learning company, to embed its technology in the ServiceNow platform and across its products. “ServiceNow is at the forefront of intelligent automation,” Dave Wright, chief strategy officer, ServiceNow, says in a statement. “Adding DxContinuum to the ServiceNow platform will move much more of the heavy lifting of work processes to machines, freeing people to focus on the highest value work.”