Fletcher Building tops CIO100 ranking

Fletcher Building is named the biggest IT-using organisation in New Zealand in CIO100, which ranks organisations based on screens, staff and turnover.

Who made it to the 2014 CIO100?

With approximately 18,600 employees globally, more than 50 businesses under its umbrella and operating in more than 40 countries, Fletcher Building is Australasia's largest building materials supplier. This year, the company reported a total of 36,114 screens and 350 IT staff.

“Fletcher Building is entering a period of IT transformation across all its businesses,” says Carl Powell, group CIO, in the report that was released at the CIO100 breakfast forum at SkyCity Convention Centre. “Supporting the FBUnite business transformation programme is key, whilst also rationalising and modernising core back office systems and driving high customer value digital initiatives.”

Fonterra Co-operative is number two, and healthAlliance is number three.

More than 130 CIOs and other business technology executives attended the forum, which featured speakers Marcus Darbyshire, vice president, executive partner, Gartner Executive Programs; Martin Catterall, CIO, St John; Claire Govier, CIO, healthAlliance; Geoff Lawrie, country manager, Cisco NZ; Geoff Beynon, country manager, SAS; and Ian Forrester, managing director, Plan B.

The report finds top ICT investments of the CIO100 organisations in the next 18 months are in software as a service and cloud technologies, followed by initiatives in mobility, business intelligence and analytics, wireless connectivity and business continuity.

The top business technology trends this year include CIOs taking the data implosion further and investing in analytics; and organisations facing head on the impact of consumerisation of IT. BYOD, for instance, has become mainstream for the CIO100 organisations; 59 per cent of respondents have policies in place, with 24 others saying it will be allowed in the future.

The report concludes: The evolution of the CIO role continues at a heightened pace to match the growing convergence of technology trends of mobile, social, cloud and big data. This is compounded by the rise of the Internet of Things and continuous uptake of digital platforms.

More CIOs are working on customer-facing systems, backing and leading digital initiatives, and developing new capabilities in their teams as they tackle new technologies and ways to access technology services. A related development is the creation of executive roles with an added focus on digital.

The imperative is for the C-suite to shift to what the CIO Executive Council, calls the ‘D-suite’.

Essentially, this refers to traditional C-suites remodelling or refining themselves to become digital savvy C-suites or D-Suites. To succeed in this transformation, as the CIO Executive Council points out, there has to be a pathfinder or champion, a role CIOs can take on in the months ahead.

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