Education / Interviews

Anna Brodie and her team at Education Payroll delivered EdPay, a fully online payroll service for schools that is replacing the infamous Novopay.

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."

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.

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)

“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.

“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.

“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.

Our TXT2Remind technology is used by 70 per cent of the GP market, says Vensa Health CEO Ahmad Jubbawey

Our innovations are unique as no-one has ever tried to combine data from so many sources via the Internet of Things around Tertiary Education before, says Lyndal Stewart, founder and chief executive of www.findmystudy.com.

Liz Gosling believes it is essential to be a “visible leader”.

For Melissa Firth, deploying a lot of ‘firsts’ is just one of the upsides of taking on the inaugural chief digital officer post at Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand.

CIO100 2017 #31-100: Grant Strang, Te Wānaga o Aotearoa

In the past three years Unitec has made serious moves to rethink the provision of learning spaces across several campuses, in association with significant curriculum rewriting and strategic property change says the institute’s chief digital officer, Owen Werner.

This year there has seen a significant refinement of our application and infrastructure “heatmaps”, says Andy Keiller, CIO at the University of Canterbury.

“Our job is to reduce this complexity for schools, making sure teachers and students can release the throttle on fantastic learning, equipped as confident, connected learners prepared for 21st century success,” says John Hanna, CEO at Network for Learning.

“Innovation is core to AUT as the university for the changing world. This comes not only from the centre but from our academics and students,” says Liz Gosling.

Over the past 12 months, Business Mechanix embarked on its biggest challenge to date, the spinning off and launching a startup company called Find My Study. ​

John Holley of the Manukau Institute of Technology sees the importance of ICT being seen as ‘trusted advisors’ across the organisation.

Massey University is midway through a major business transformation programme. It commenced in mid-2015 and is due for phased deployment from late-2017 onwards, says its CIO Alistair James.