Movers and shakers: Shayne Tong, David Hope and Roger Rennie
- 29 August, 2017 06:30
Shayne Tong at the CIO100 breakfast forum in Auckland.
Shayne Tong is now Chief of Intelligence & Informatics at Auckland District Health Board. His appointment was announced by ADHB CEO, Ailsa Claire.
His remit is equivalent to that of a CIO and is responsible for driving forward ADHB and the Northern Regions digital healthcare strategies. This includes core clinical and business systems, integrated care solutions, health intelligence and innovation across the healthcare system.
Tong came to Auckland District Health Board with extensive experience in technology and digital experience in both operational and large complex transformation delivery in global corporations domestically and overseas.
Prior to joining the District Health Board, he worked as the Chief Information Officer at Genesis Energy. He has also previously held senior positions at Fletcher Building as well as Barclays Group and Goldman Sachs in the United Kingdom.
David Hope, president of Workday in Asia Pacific, provides an insight on what to expect when the company moves to the platform as a service market.
By opening the platform, it means customer, developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) can extend the functionality of Workday, says Hope, who was in Auckland last week for the company’s Discover forum.
Workday, with headquarters in Pleasanton, California, provides cloud-based human capital management and financial management software.
The Workday cloud is a closed platform currently and customers were requesting from day one for it to open the platform and use it as a digital backbone and build solutions around it, says Hope.
We started with a clean sheet of paper in the cloud
But there was a whole bunch of things we wanted to do strategically first, he says, referring to the deployment of HCM, the company’s subsequent international expansion, then the rolling out of financial management, planning and prism analytics.
We started with a clean sheet of paper in the cloud, Hope tells CIO New Zealand.
“With legacy systems, everything is difficult to pull out and extract data. You are pulling in data from different sources,and you have lots of different versions, and you have to keep them current,” he says.
“With a single code line we take all that away. Everyone is on the latest version. That is absolutely critical,” he says. “This means there is one source of truth for HR and finance.”
That is the ‘power of one’, he says, referring to the company’s decision to build with one version of software, one customer community, one codeline, one security model, and one user experience, all delivered in a single system.
Hope says the details of their move to PaaS will be released at Workday’s annual customer conference Rising in October.
He cites how they recently held a hackathon in Las Vegas with the partner community on a number of innovations as part of the shift to PaaS. One company built a linkage into Workday for employees who wanted to donate to a dedicated charity.
He likewise reveals a large ANZ customer who is one of the beta customers will talk about what they are doing around identity management and other unique requirements that they are linking into the Workday platform.
Roger Rennie is now a director at boutique consulting agency IT Success. His previous roles included CIO at PGG Wrightson and CRT Society. He has also worked at KPMG and Cap Gemini Ernst and Young.
Evangelist for NZ technology
NZTech and FinTechNZ chair and Augen Software Group director Mitchell Pham calls for greater investment in promoting technology, the country’s largest export industry and fastest growing sector.
“I want to see New Zealand technology promoted to the world just as we have made a huge effort over the past 20 years to globally feature tourism in this country,” says Pham, in a statement.
“As a technology entrepreneur who has travelled extensively throughout Asia, the lack of knowledge of Kiwi tech ingenuity is a constant frustration for me. There's no place in the Asian region where I can use the NZ Inc. brand to help position a tech business as being from a well-known high-tech export nation.
“This is why NZTech is actively working to develop the NZ Tech Story in collaboration with Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and New Zealand Story to add being a high-tech nation as an integral part of the story we tell the world about ourselves. We can all participate and add to the development of the story via the NZ Tech Story Forum on LinkedIn.
“New Zealand has invested heavily in promoting education and tourism for decades, which is why we are so well known in Asia for these industries. It's time we make an ongoing investment into promoting our fastest growing sector of our economy. The sooner the better, as it will take time to build the brand association between NZ and high-tech nation.”
I want to see New Zealand technology promoted to the world just as we have made a huge effort over the past 20 years to globally feature tourism in this country
He also notes technology businesses are more relevant when promoted as part of the sectors that they serve.
Tourism, education, dairy, beef and lamb, fruit, wine, high quality food products, other primary exports, banking and engineering are just some of the sectors that have been developing in Asia for some time, he says.
"Critical mass is important for branding in Asia. So while we haven't got many large tech brands from New Zealand, such as Orion Health and Xero, we do have a large number of tech firms."
“NZ Techweek next year will be a huge opportunity to promote tech,” says Pham. “We should also work smartly by tapping into relevant networks that are available to us. High-value and high-trust networks are full of influencers and connectors, so they are good channels to push the NZ tech story, such as KEA, New Zealand Asian Leaders (NZAL), ASEAN-NZ Business Council and similar networks connected in New Zealand and Asia.”
New Zealand startup Ilumony says it has helped Kiwis make smarter decisions with more than $7 million in financial investments since launching in private beta testing mode earlier this year. Of the $7 million, it says it has charged no fees for advice on $1 million worth of customer KiwiSaver money.
Ilumony monitors publicly available KiwiSaver funds to deliver financial advice to users online, no matter the size of their bank account or investment portfolio. The fintech startup also provides advice and access to a range of globally diversified investment portfolios outside of KiwiSaver.
Founder, CEO and authorised financial advisor Rachel Strevens says Ilumony is working with employer groups to provide KiwiSaver advice to their staff.
Strevens says the uptake by employer groups and their staff members showed there was a need for accessible financial advice in New Zealand, which was the premise for founding Ilumony.
“We've found that our hybrid model of an online investment platform combined with the ability to talk to Authorised Financial Adviser (AFA) if required is working really well, and is allowing us to work with a wider range of customers,” adds co-founder and chief technology officer Abhy Singla.
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