Business Continuity / Interviews

“We continue to innovate on many fronts, in many countries,” says Kevin Drinkwater, CIO at Mainfreight.

Robert Holmes provides CIO and CTO services not only to the Origin Group, but also to their customers.

Tina Wakefield says major programmes are being implemented around business intelligence analytics at the Ministry of Justice.

“ICT has developed a pathway for how we will move towards digital courts, which reflect our goal of building people-centred justice services,” says Tina Wakefield, Deputy Secretary ICT/CIO at the Ministry of Justice.

“Westpac New Zealand’s challenge has been to transform from a formal and somewhat less efficient organisation, into one that can create great customer experiences rapidly, responding to opportunities and threats alike,” says the bank’s CIO, Dawie Olivier.

With a number of high-profile security breaches making headlines of late, organizations are increasingly realizing they must beef up their security teams or risk catastrophe. Matt Comyns, global co-head of the Cybersecurity practice at Russell Reynolds Associates, an executive leadership and search firm, sat down with CIO.com to discuss the changing role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), the global cybersecurity landscape and why finding and retaining elite security talent is critical.

Matt Tucker proudly shows off the new Les Mills New Zealand headquarters in the Auckland CBD, only a few hundred metres from where the fitness chain’s namesake and his wife opened their first gym in 1968.
“It’s been a great ride, and I think we’re headed towards some pretty exciting things very soon,” says the CIO of the fitness chain. Les Mills has 45,000 members across 11 gyms located around the country, with its latest gym opening in Britomart late last year.

Taupo accountancy firm Strettons has turned to StorageCraft ShadowProtect backup and restore software after a new server kept crashing.

On the day of the 7.1 magnitude earthquake that struck Canterbury, Gavin Till, IM&CT Business Unit Manager at the Christchurch City Council, counted his lucky stars.
Had the former civic office on Tuam Street — and the old datacentre still within — sustained more damage than it did, and if the full data outsource to the new data centre hadn’t finished just minutes before the quake, staff and emergency crews could have been hamstrung for hours, possibly days, without access to critical IT applications and services.

Jeff Olsson has a consuming need for speed, but not at any price.
As the group executive for technology at the Australian Securities

Imagine, if you will, a world with no internet. No email. No e-commerce. And no BlackBerrys. Email would be supplanted by snail mail; cell phones by land lines. Now imagine what the future would look like. Futurists say virtual business services of all sorts, accounting, payroll and even sales would come to a halt, as would many companies.

We ask tech veterans near and far for tales of personal woe and destruction at the hands of IT run amok.
First: Nightmare at Napster

DuWayne Peterson always believed in making time for business and IT strategy.
In fact, on the morning of Monday, 19 October 1987, Peterson, then vice president of systems, operations and telecommunications at Merrill Lynch, went to his office in the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan while a good portion of his senior staff attended a strategic offsite in Princeton, N.J. The previous Friday, to Peterson and the rest of his Wall Street colleagues, the market looked grim. The the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) fell 108 points to close at 2246.74. On Thursday, U.S. Treasury Secretary James Baker expressed concerns to the media over the massive sell-offs. Over the weekend, investors began to sweat. Pundits, economists and politicians went on television, hedging their bets about the market.