Stories by Divina Paredes

Being in the Army is a 'family tradition' for John Holley. His grandfather fought in World Wars one and two, and his father was a soldier and mechanic, and later on, a supplier, in the Army. So Holley grew up living in military bases across New Zealand. On a summer break from Massey University, where he was studying computer science, Holley worked as a driver in the Linton Army Camp in Palmerston North. After graduation, he moved to a number of IT management, sales, and consulting roles, including at the University of Auckland, the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind, and most recently, the Auckland Regional Council where he was a CIO and acting General Manager Operations. Yet, Holley never really left the Army. Today, he is a reserve officer, with the rank of Lt Colonel. He joined an operational deployment to East Timor in 2002, and spends 60 to 80 days a year working with the NZ Defence Force where he is a staff officer at the Directorate of Reserve Forces and Youth Development. He spends two weeks a year teaching operational planning and leadership at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto. He explains why he never really left his holiday job 28 years ago."For me it has always been about being involved in some other stuff that gives a bit of diversity. People get confused; here is John Holley the geek running around, shooting weapons. There is a bit of discontinuity for some people. But the key thing for me is the stuff I learned about leadership and management that does not really come from the IT environment. "Even as a part-time soldier or officer, every year you train staff, and are given opportunities around leadership. You are taught about strategic geopolitical theory, strategy, leadership, a whole range of things to turn you into a senior officer. When you go away and do this planning, you work in environments where you can actually make a significant difference -- good or bad -- by your actions. It is no good to say 'all I know how to do is shoot a rifle'. You need to understand strategy."When I was in East Timor, I was the planning officer for the New Zealand battalion. My job was to write the plans and I was writing those on behalf of the commanding officer and we were a multinational battalion. You can apply that framework to almost anything."I do the same thing in a different way [at ARC, now part of the Auckland Council]. It was about, what are you looking to achieve, what is the business looking to achieve? It challenges your assumptions... It is interesting going to some seminars recently there has been quite a bit of stuff around virtualisation and how you present it to the business. It is almost like they missed the mark because they start talking about consolidation of servers, everything else that comes back to IT being a cost. If you are talking about what are the services you want to enable [with virtualisation], that is a different conversation.""In the Army, you are being constantly evaluated on your leadership. You are an officer 24x7. You have what you call the 'game face'. You have to motivate and lead people."

A group of ICT executives have crossed the Tongariro Alpine Crossing four consecutive times in 29 hours and raised $66,000 for Kia Timata Ano (KTA) Trust, a women’s refuge in the Rodney District.

“We look at our own projects as templates for our customers.”
This, says Steve Matheson, is the first key difference he faces at Datacom New Zealand that his CIO colleagues in other enterprises may not otherwise encounter.

CIOs are increasingly being asked to lead initiatives beyond ICT. CIOs share their insights on managing this challenge

There was a call for an integrated approach from government and enterprise to ensure online security at a recent presentation in Auckland by Dr Prescott Winter, CTO public sector, for security vendor ArcSight.
Winter cites the experience of the airline industry, which can be used towards developing a layered defence strategy for government and the private sector in the online arena.

A discussion with Geoff Yeats, CIO of Farmers Mutual Group at the recent CIO Summit, got me thinking about the crafting of the CIO’s ‘elevator speech’.
The scenario: What would be your two-minute pitch to describe your role and what you can deliver, to a ‘very important stakeholder’ — in this case, the CEO or the board?

Robert Hillard has a simple formula to determine which business units are underperforming.

<strong>Gearing for transformation</strong>

Pip Marlow and Russell Crowe share a vaguely similar career trajectory, sort of.

CIOs are among the most time pressed executives, and will usually take a breather — a week at least, a month or two — before moving to another full-on role.

When IT projects fail, the usual reaction for CEOs and the boards is to blame the software, third party consultants, or the IT department, says Sarah J Runge, director of Corporate Profiling Global at ITPSB Corporation in the US.

August de los Reyes has observed children using a painting software program on a surface tablet. He saw them hold up their hands to check for paint smudges.
Once, he brought his mother to his office and she played with the apps on a surface tablet. &#8220;She was so into the experience,&#8221; says de los Reyes.

Michael Shallcross, an engineer with the IBM Global Technology Services Asia Pacific, believes a bank branch and an ATM are apt models to demonstrate cloud computing.
Speaking at the recent IDC Cloud Computing Conference in Auckland, Shallcross, said the bank branch is the &#8220;ultimate inflexible delivery model that is capital intensive&#8221;.

There are now more than 500 million Facebook users across the globe and enterprises are flocking to the social networking site to create their own pages.
But creating a compelling Facebook brand presence requires forethought and commitment, says a recent Forrester report.

Last month, a proud Kiwi took centre stage at the Verizon Center in Washington DC. The estimated 13,000 audience sat riveted as the battle scenes in the Return of the King, the second of the Lord of the Rings movies, played on the wide screen.
The man on stage, Scott Houston, CEO of InterGrid, explains how the 80,000 &#8220;really ugly&#8221; Orcs on screen had to be individually rendered by Weta Digital.