CIO50 2021 #4: Nicholas Fourie, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare
Fisher & Paykel Healthcare vice president ICT, Nicholas Fourie says the past 18 months have been about the business pivoting in response to COVID.
Fisher & Paykel Healthcare vice president ICT, Nicholas Fourie says the past 18 months have been about the business pivoting in response to COVID.
We are forging through with an insights driven culture with the introduction of an advanced analytics platform and data engineering/data science capabilities, says Tim Aynsley, head of ICT at Mercury NZ.
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.
“My team is predominantly embedded into other functional areas,” says Andrew Haddad, CIO of Vodafone New Zealand. “We work in an agile manner, which is an inherently innovative way of working in a large organisation, and aim to support all other teams to be successful via great digital platforms.”
“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.
Centrality is a blockchain venture studio that partners with innovators in key industries to create a decentralised peer-to-peer marketplace of applications. CTO Wilfred Godfrey says the organisation is always looking for innovative ways to break down the barriers that are holding back the mainstream adoption of blockchain.
healthAlliance, in partnership with the district health boards, has for the past two years been delivering the the Northern Region Information Systems Strategic Plan, one of the largest digital transformations in New Zealand.
Jennifer Sepull highlights her team’s work on the company-wide programme to improve Air New Zealand’s On Time Performance (OTP) metrics, which led to a raft of innovations across the business
AUT has implemented the most comprehensive cybersecurity campaign, which not only addressed threats behind the scenes, but also increased awareness among staff and students, says its CIO Liz Gosling. “While cybersecurity may be regarded by some as ‘housekeeping’, the increasing sophistication of threats means the risk of members of staff and students being exposed to them are greater. This can no longer be seen as business as usual at the university."
Through working with partners and using SaaS in the investment management space, Kiwi Wealth CTO Craig Ward says they are able to launch new funds and offerings to the market quickly and at a reduced cost.
Pieter Bakker says his team at Frucor Suntory has developed the ‘B-X-T’ framework which demonstrates how (B)usiness and (T)echnology are jointly responsible for the outcome (the consumer, customer or employee e(X)perience). Within this partnership, business leads the change and technology leads the solution and delivery.
Over the past two years as inaugural chief technology officer at Entrada Travel Group (ETG), Pete Yates and his team worked on a portfolio of initiatives with massive impact on the organisation. “No part of the business has been left untouched,” says Yates of the programmes that include implementing a new financial system incorporating all financial workloads, replacing the core reservation system and bringing corporate data into one place.
Changing customer and regulator expectations and the digital revolution are the top drivers for Fidelity Life’s digital transformation and agile approach, says the insurance firm’s CTO Dan Wilkinson.
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.
“The FrEnd project is an ambitious endeavour to consolidate our web experiences into a single API-backed platform, allowing us to leapfrog years of technical debt,” says Simon Young, chief product and technology officer at Trade Me, on one of his team’s biggest initiative over the past year.
Gallagher Group CIO Neville Richardson says IS provides a model of culture change for the rest of the organisation. “We demonstrate the need to go all in with agile.”
Allan Lightbourne, chief digital officer at Tauranga City Council, got his team members to work with their colleagues from across the organisation, and look at the city’s key challenges that could be alleviated by technology.
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.
“We have an explicit ‘non-technology first approach’,” says Nicholas Fourie, vice president – ICT at Fisher & Paykel Healthcare. The goal for him and his team is to become so integrated in the business, so they are called upon to solve problems whether there is a digital solution or not.
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.