“We have created the Via Innovation model to encourage designers of smart tech to partner with the health board,” says Stella Ward, chief digital officer at Canterbury and West Coast District Health Board
“We wanted to improve operational efficiency and increase cross-functional collaboration, by disrupting and changing our traditional way of working,” says Roger Jones, executive general manager technology at Auckland Transport
“People and partnerships matter,” says Andrew Goodin, who has worked for over 10 years at Zespri, including CIO and acting chief digital officer. “It is very difficult to create something of value alone.”
Transpower is working on several projects that harness AI and related technologies. One of these is the deployment of the robots Wall-E and Evie to provide real-time situational awareness of their remote sites.
“We continue to innovate on many fronts, in many countries,” says Kevin Drinkwater, CIO at Mainfreight.
Counties Power CIO Sarah Ellisdon adheres to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s famous dictum of, “Don't be a know-it-all; be a learn-it-all.”
Figured was built on the idea of connecting farmers and their advisors on a common cloud financial platform to enable better collaboration across each member of the farming team, says its chief technology officer Richard Wyke.
“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
“Don’t follow a rulebook and instead do what’s right for our organisation and culture,” says Rebecca Chenery of Watercare on leading digital transformation programmes.
We use the BXT (Business - eXperience – Technology) approach for change management, says Pieter Bakker of Frucor Suntory
Spark has made the transition to Agile @scale, an unprecedented business model of this scale in New Zealand. Where previously technology people all sat at desks on one area, now they are spread throughout several different tribes and squads, explains Mark Beder, whose role combines both the CIO and CTO functions at Spark
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.”
The large ICT-focused MBIE business groups – Immigration New Zealand, Market Services, Corporate and Enterprise - have successfully planned and undertaken a considerable pipeline of ICT projects in the past year, says Ralph Chivers, MBIE CIO. “Our role has been to enable and support them in those activities.”
“At the core of the relationship between an accountant and a business is - trust. Trust that you'll be given correct accounts, the right advice and that your most closely held financial and organisational data will be given all due care and responsibility,” says James Dickinson, CIO of BDO New Zealand. It is this backdrop that BDO New Zealand embarked on an ambitious programme of enhancing its cyber defences and controls, says Dickinson.
“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.
Ministry for Primary Industries CIO Tracy Voice says a key focus for her team over the past year has been embedding the Research, Technology and Innovation practice across the organisation. The goal is to “bring prototypes to life on emerging technologies” as well as use emerging technologies to transform government operating models.
“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."
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.
We have leadership teams based around the world, in places such as Vienna, Sao Paolo and Houston, says John Emerson, CIO of Tait Communications. “Sharing common information is critical to effective management, as well as collaboration. While the reporting lines are generally the same, staff behaviours are moving from local to global."
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."
