Editor’s note: Mark Denvir passed away suddenly at the age of 57 in August 2022. As a visionary CIO, he has regularly featured in the CIO50 List over the years. Denvir's submission for the CIO50 2022 was written prior to his passing. His inclusion in this year’s list has the blessing of his family and colleagues. Kua hinga he totara i te wao nui a Tane.

In 2022, Mark Denvir and his ICT team designed and delivered an entirely new way of managing local government data whilst driving operational costs down significantly by $12.8 million per annum.

This saw the innovative delivery of a multi-cloud hybrid environment for Auckland Council, reducing annual operating costs whilst creating an adaptive, efficient and effective tech landscape.

This was an entirely unique approach in its fully customised cloud design to create council’s own cloud design, purpose-built system to optimise data and storage while providing modern solutions to business problems and a foundation for the organisation’s digital transformation.

In addition to the annual $12.8m savings, the multi-cloud environment means ongoing savings contribution to Council through cost optimisation of data and cloud costs, leveraging flexibility to position workloads to its most effective locations; ensuring that IT capacity can grow as Auckland grows.

The multi-cloud platform will continue to deliver more efficiencies through increased flexibility, data centre processing and storage capacity at a lower cost. Additional savings are expected to be realised as ongoing lifecycle and transformation activities continue to remove tech debt, taking full advantage of our hybrid cloud platform.

“MultiCloud has positioned Council to become more agile and adaptable with the system easily able to scale and flex to the changing needs of Tamaki Makaurau, whilst driving costs down,” said Denvir. “MultiCloud data centre platform technology has improved security and the ability to troubleshoot issues proactively at pace. This makes Council more resilient to the omnipresent threat of cyber compromise giving Aucklanders increased confidence in the organisation’s data security. “

Rapid expansion of Auckland’s growing data

In 2010 Auckland Council amalgamated into a Supercity organisation which saw the inheritance of a behemoth and complex set of IT systems. This included 16 data centres were slow, complex, and difficult to use. Outages were frequent and resulted in business disruption, slow project delivery and a poor customer experience.  

As the organisation adapts to the emerging needs of Tamaki Makaurau, a significant disruption to the management of systems, data and accessibility was required to ensure that the council could not only operate at reduced cost but continue to increase its IT data capture alongside the rapid expansion of the region’s growing data.

The alignment of the ICT strategy to the organisation’s strategy has seen the digitalisation of council services and Council embracing automation. This has enabled the Council to deliver on its strategy and commitment to reduce its cost to serve and improve customers’ experience with Auckland Council.  

Denvir navigated the council’s commitment to invest in an optimised technology landscape, embrace emerging technology and cloud infrastructure, and mitigate significant risk of city data loss with the implementation of the Multicloud strategy (live 2020); leveraging multiple cloud platforms including Public Cloud services and Council owned infrastructure, driving down Auckland Council’s ICT annual technology infrastructure cost to serve from $17.5m to $5.5m.  

This approach saw several vendors quickly realise the value in unique data storage solutions with Auckland Council now positioned to sell this innovation to other entities whilst generating revenue for council in the process.

Partnership collective approach

Denvir joined Auckland Council in May 2013 as enterprise services manager before becoming acting head of information services in November 2015 and director ICT in mid-2017.

By taking an entirely new and radical approach for Council through a ‘partnership collective approach’ Denvir has ensured that technology is always front of mind and a core part of any critical business planning activity underway – before change commences as an operational and logistical action. 

This has seen the IT department start to shift in the business’ perception as a ‘back-room engine operational function' to ‘thought leaders and critical enablers’ of business success. 

Denvir restructured his Leadership Team so that as the organisation responds and adapts to meet the emerging needs of the region – his team has been positioned to ensure that core functions, systems, technologies and more importantly people are strategically aligned to the organisation’s inputs and outputs to deliver efficiently and effectively.

Another critical activity which supports the key narratives and objectives of the ICT strategy and Denvir’s stakeholder engagement is ensuring effective and timely communications across the organisation. This has seen a significant capability uplift within the IT department with People Leaders having to grow and develop their core capabilities in improving their engagement and communications to business, resulting in less business disruption during planned outage activities and an improved presence of the IT department as a whole.

As a result, the business has become more receptive to and engaged with the objectives and direction that Denvir and his leadership team have been driving, through an effective and comprehensive stakeholder management shift.

These conversations at multiple tier levels enabled Denvir to continuously bring technology front of mind for the business. In doing so, it has brought critical conversations highlighting and mitigating risk, building in organisational resilience and enabling key functions and critical systems to be considered as part of the ongoing need to build a future proof and customisable tech landscape for Auckland Council.