Big Data / Interviews

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

“The innovative use of technology, enhanced through our own development capabilities, is transforming the value we can gain from data, and enhancing the data services we provide for New Zealand,” says Christopher Buxton, chief digital officer, Stats NZ

CIO New Zealand launches the inaugural CIO50, recognising the nation's top 50 technology and digital chiefs of 2019, at the Te Papa in Wellington (Photos by Mark Coote)

“It’s a thousand apps working together...Think of it as a thousand zebras, running in a herd against the competition, rather than one unicorn,” says Aaron McDonald of Centrality

We use the BXT (Business - eXperience – Technology) approach for change management, says Pieter Bakker of Frucor Suntory

It is important for the CIO to become the ‘trusted advisor’ in the organisation, says Gerard Naish, head of ICT at Ports of Auckland. “Ideally, this means rather than finding ways to bypass IT, people instead beat a path to your door.”

Public Trust has a proud history, strong profile and national footprint in New Zealand, but we needed to make significant structure, culture and technology changes to take advantage of an underserved, expanding and fragmented trustee services market, says its chief executive Bob Smith.

Stella Ward holds two major portfolios in the Canterbury District Health Board (DHB). One is the information services group and the other is executive director for Allied Health, a joint position with Canterbury and West Coast DHB. She provides leadership and governance for the allied health, technical and scientific professions which include 42 different disciplines. Digital transformation is a key theme in both of these roles.

“IBM has moved to an Agile office environment, in keeping with our worldwide vision for a Workforce of the Future,” say the technology company’s New Zealand CIO Doug Stuart.

Pete Yates has kicked off the HealthLink 2020 plan (IT Tech Strategy) by defining a set of goals and associated objectives. The plan, he says, gives the organisation a view of what it will be like in three years, how it will function and the expected behaviours of all staff. The plan is designed to empower teams to make decisions (such as ‘test first, APIs second and building for cloud’).

“In a year when everyone was trialling new capabilities to drive further improvements to business process and customer outcomes (including ourselves), we decided do the basics better,” says Jason Patrick Mangan, director IT services at the University of Auckland. This is the backdrop of the “Service Effectiveness” programme which focused on what matters most to their customers - students, faculty and the university staff.

“With a significant reduction in capital and operational budgets, the challenge has been to keep technical debt, and its associated risks, at an acceptable level, against the backdrop of the university’s new technology roadmap,” says Andy Keiller, chief information officer, University of Canterbury. “This roadmap has the key component of an integration layer that will allow the leveraging of legacy technology and solutions by creating the opportunity to develop new services through modern presentation technologies. It will also allow easier integration of new solutions with older ones."

“We are confident, audacious and constantly challenging ourselves, the status quo and leading the pace of change,” is how Grant Strang describes the approach of the technology team at tertiary provider Te Wānanga o Aotearoa (TWoA). The results, he says, can be seen in the range of projects they have delivered over the past year.

“Driving technology transformation required me to adapt the business case and ‘technical solution sell’ to many different stakeholders,” says Nathan John Steiner, head of systems engineering ANZ, at Veeam.

“We place great value on our customers and as part of this, the executive team launched an initiative to re-invent customer care,” says Mikal Todd, CIO of solarcity. “We are a large Salesforce customer and our goals were to understand the key metrics surrounding care issue resolution, simplify day to day work and provide reporting and dashboarding capability.”

“Quotable Value (QV) is currently engaged on a significant transformation programme, enabled by technology. The technology programme, known internally as Monarch, aims to meet two core objectives,” says Duncan Reed, chief data officer. The first is to replace a heritage technology platform with a new, state of the art technology platform, which enables our core professional services business to continue to grow and thrive, says Reed, who is now working as a business strategy consultant.

Xtracta has enhanced its data identification, capture and interpretation capability of legal documents such as contracts, says Jonathan Spence, CEO and CIO of Xtracta. Through the company’s machine learning capability, the software learns from interactions with the customer’s users and in doing so, it continues to fine-tune its interpretive and understanding abilities of legal documents he says.

“Being a good CIO means you need to focus on things other than the technology,” says Neville Richardson of Gallagher Group.
“IT managers deal with technology. CIOs understand that IS is about the interaction of Technology, Process, People and Structures. If you look at why IS initiatives fail, it will always be that one of these elements, or the way they interact, have been forgotten about,” says Richardson.

For the past two years, ACC has been delivering transformational business change that puts our customers at the heart of what we do, says Paul Jepson, CIO of ACC. “This transformation programme is all about improving our customers’ outcomes and experience. To do this, and to deliver better customer service, requires an integrated approach across our people, processes, technology and information."

Chris Buxton says the technology team at Stats NZ have completed numerous innovation activities including sponsoring its own public hack events. These activities ranged from large scale vendor engagements to smaller scale explorations.