MIS100 2012: The new leadership platform

The challenging economic times of recent years meant CIOs in the largest enterprises in New Zealand have honed their skills in ‘doing more with less’. This entailed maximising resources for new programmes, while ensuring critical daily operations were not compromised.

This year, however, CIOs in the MIS100 —the largest ICT using organisations in New Zealand, reveal their mission — and portfolio — is expanding. So much so that a necessary skill set for them and their team is prioritising a raft of initiatives, and explaining the rationale for their decisions to both their executive peers and the general users.

At the same time, these CIOs find themselves managing new technologies — social platforms and other collaboration tools are being piloted or rolled out in both private and public sector organisations. Meanwhile, more and more users are clamouring to use their own devices at work, and with the cloud, some are bypassing IT to buy technology services and applications.

Who made it to the MIS100 list for 2012? Click here.

Find out the 'bubblling under' organisations - those just below the 100 - and who are top contenders for next year.

Raad the top 10 business technology trends in this year's MIS100.

Julian Moore of the Wellington City Council says the continued requests by employees to use their own devices, such as smartphones and tablets, “will require that IT develop a response that enables greater freedom for employees to utilise these devices while maintaining security of infrastructure and information”.

Craig Soutar of the NZTA says the organisation has recently started a mobile device management capability project.

The range of devices connected to the system now includes iPads, iPhones, Windows Mobile 7 smartphones and Android phones, says Soutar.

Other CIOs point to the need for new skill sets in a changing technology landscape. Winston Fong of Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, says as the company looks to engender growth in IT, staffing continues to pose a challenge, primarily the difficulty in finding IT people who understand the business and are focused on delivering business value.

“To deliver on key business objectives, we have been focusing on increasing the knowledge and skills of all IT team members about the business. To have IT systems deliver value, they need to have a sound business understanding and ensure both the technical and business outcomes are tightly coupled,” he says.


David Habershon, CIO of the Ministry of Social Development, describes how these shifts are impacting enterprise technology teams and strategies. “The way people manage their day-to-day transactions has changed dramatically in the last decade,” he says. “They don’t organise their lives neatly around how government agencies are configured, and we don’t think that they should have to. Technology is at the forefront of the way we are changing how we do our business. Being able to deliver our services in a way that meets the future needs of New Zealanders is what drives our IT strategy.”

Amidst all these changes, the complexity of the systems that CIOs in the MIS100 have to manage is increasing. Victor Vae’au, acting CIO at New Zealand Defence Force, likens the organisational landscape to that of a country. “We have every line of business you can think of, with a technology system of systems to support it. The risks lie in duplication and an unstructured approach to how we organise our data. Our information must be meaningful and provide insight to how we are performing. Our role is to leverage industry capability, to utilise shared services, including All of Government initiatives where we are common with the rest to deliver business services, and to focus our energy on the core capabilities of the NZDF — enabling military outputs.”

Insights into the rankings
The members of the top 10 organisations over the past two years have remained the same, though the ranking has shifted. As in previous years, mergers and acquisitions and the growing adoption of shared services particularly in the public sector, had a major impact on the ranking. A prime example is healthAlliance — the shared services organisation formed by the Northern region district health boards — which has been ranked number one for the second year.

Mergers in the public sector are ongoing, with the creation of a ‘super ministry’ merging the existing Economic
Development and Science and Innovation ministries with the Department of Labour and the Department of Building and Housing. Shared services are being initiated in the health sector and in schools, which
could mean major changes in the organisations to be included in next year’s list.

There are six new organisations entering the MIS100 this year — Silver Fern Farms, Toll Networks, Kristin School, Whitireia Community Polytechnic, AsureQuality and Turners & Growers. Except for Toll Networks, these organisations are not exactly newcomers to the report, as they have already been profiled as MIS100 organisations, or the ‘bubbling under’ group — the organisations just below the 100.

The public sector continues to dominate the list, comprising nearly half of the organisations — and these organisations include those in education and health and community services. Government and defence organisations make up a fifth of the list, followed by education services at 17 percent, and health and community services at 11 percent. Business management and scientific services, manufacturing, finance and insurance and retail and trade make up the majority of private sector organisations in the list (see graph above). Per region,
Auckland leads the list with 44 organisations, followed by 34 in Wellington and nine in Christchurch.