Stories by Divina Paredes

Thomas Hyde operates across different levels at Beca, leading a team with a diverse and strategic portfolio and over the past year, influenced the organisation to modify its mission statement.

“Our objective was not just to improve the current carbon offset offerings but to reinvent the market itself,” says Paul Brady, chief technology officer and co-founder of startup Carbon Click.

ANZ is always looking for opportunities to improve and personalise customer experience by providing a more natural and simple interaction, says Craig Bunyan, general manager technology at ANZ New Zealand.

Over the past two years, Jason Mangan and his team at the University of Auckland have designed and implemented Connect. “Within this single organisation, our application and infrastructure staff are now organised into common practices and orchestrated across 26 multi-disciplinary teams, aligned to our academic faculty and business division customers in a value stream formation,” says Mangan.

Nathan Scott says Valocity Global has demonstrated strategic leadership in solving a critical need for innovation in markets restricted by legacy technology and manual processes. In doing so, it has brought choice and transformational change to the property valuation industry for the first time in several territories.

Rebecca Chenery has been leading a cultural and digital transformation of Watercare for nearly three years now.
“Through this digital transformation, the most significant change achieved has been the cultural shift towards agile, collaborative, cross-functional team working across all areas of the business – not just projects delivering digital solutions,” she says.

Piers Shore increased the focus on digital delivery within his leadership team following a review of IT-related activity across business units. The aim is to identify duplicate or inefficient spend that would be more efficient if centralised to IT. This has provided a centralised development capability for digital initiatives across Fonterra.

“Building a comprehensive data set of real-time data on our environmental issues, our farming practices, and our cities needs is contributing towards a shift to a smarter, innovative and liveable city for the future, now,” says Mark John Denvir, ICT director at Auckland Council.

Shehan Bala says he constantly challenges other leaders within UneeQ to critically assess whether or not everything they are doing right now is directly moving them towards their vision for the company. “This is an important health check to ensure that we are using data and evidence to confirm that we are delivering value to our customers, and not getting led astray by confirmation bias,” says Bala, chief product officer at UneeQ, the Kiwi firm that provides AI-powered digital humans to organisations across the globe.

“My approach is to let business users make informed choices and create compelling business cases that are win/wins,” says Contact Energy CIO Iain Gauld.

Anna Brodie and her team at Education Payroll delivered EdPay, a fully online payroll service for schools that is replacing the infamous Novopay.

“Critical to the success of any CIO is the team around them, and the most important lesson I have learned has been to ensure that I put in place the most effective team possible,” says Mandy Kennedy, chief technology officer of Regional Facilities Auckland.

Harmoney had just celebrated its fifth year and has grown from a startup to a strong successful business, says its CTO Andrew Bates.

“The most important lesson I have learnt so far is to be open-minded in my perspective as a leader,” says Christine Yip, business improvement manager at LSG Sky Chefs NZ.

Foodstuffs North Island has moved from not even operating retail e-commerce to having online revenues now measured in the hundreds of millions annually, says its chief digital officer Simon Kennedy.