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."
“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.
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."
“Harmoney is at its core a data company, we are continually looking for new technologies to support a data-driven, customer-focused user experience,” says Andrew Bates, CTO at Harmoney.
At the start of the year Andrew Goodin was asked to step up as acting chief digital officer. It is a role that complements the recent projects he and his team have completed.
“Continuous improvement is a regular agenda for our leadership team, and this has helped drive improvement across all technology areas,” says Craig Bunyan, general manager technology at ANZ Bank.
“We have successfully implemented a 'technology capabilities development' programme to modernise our aging infrastructure, move to a 'cloud first' strategy and in-source technology staff and resources,”says Sean Davidson, general manager, information technology of VTNZ.
“We deliver high-capacity, ultra-high-speed, data intensive services as part of a global group of 117+ NRENs (National Research and Education Networks) that exist for people who explore star systems, study weather patterns, research earthquakes and sequence DNA to name just a few,” says Angela Nash of REANNZ. “It’s a tough crowd,” says Nash, who holds the dual chief information and operating officer role at the Crown-owned company. “Bearing this in mind, we need to be fast and nimble to put our members and their technology at the forefront.”
“We are a software and consulting service organisation, specialising in the integrated care space. Over the past 24 months through strategic acquisitions and a roadmap focused on digital transformation, Whanau Tahi has expanded its product offerings with a view of enabling a more holistic view from home to hospital for an individual and their family,” says Vidhya Makam, chief operating officer at Whanau Tahi.
Gerard Naish says the delivery of the Self-service Information Analytics (SIA) Programme at the Ports of Auckland has immensely helped the business teams to “visualise data, share discoveries, and collaborate in intuitive new ways”.
“Our overarching and primary goal has been to grow our relevance in supporting NZ businesses, to help them digitally transform their business models and leverage the latest technologies that are available both now and into the future,” says Julie Canepa, CIO for Australia and New Zealand at Cisco.
The technology team has gone through a significant transformation, breaking from a single team into four devops style teams, say Tristin King head of Technology and Kris Lander, chief digital officer of JUCY. The four streams are business intelligence, web, bookings systems (using Microsoft Dynamics CRM) and infrastructure, both cloud and on-premise.
“Law is traditionally a conservative business that is slow to change,” says Craig Columbus, CIO at Russell McVeagh. But over the past 20 months, he says, the relatively traditional law firm has transformed its physical and technical environment, without interrupting its ability to provide excellent service to clients. “A transformation of this scale cannot be accomplished without a great deal of communication, collaboration and determination.”
“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.
“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.
Mandy Kennedy is the first chief information officer for Paperplus Group. Assessing the work environment, from the six year old server hardware to the 10-year-old network, she says, “It was evident that my first priority had to be a complete technical infrastructure refresh.”
“A key part of the role is ensuring we understand global technology trends and what and how we could apply them in the context of Chorus,” says Ewen Powell, chief technology officer of Chorus NZ.
Sonya Crosby says when she first interviewed for the role of chief innovation officer at SkyCity, her then CEO (Nigel Morrison) wanted to hear three words: Data, algorithms and customer. “All three - happily - came through in my first sentence and he was so right."
“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.”
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.
