The latest international Internet of Things (IoT) Barometer Report released by Vodafone shows that IoT spending is now taking up 24 percent of the average IT budget, equal to that being spent on cloud computing or data analytics. IoT innovation has arrived big time and it looks like New Zealand could be ahead of the curve.

The 2016 Vodafone IoT Barometer Report survey was conducted by Circle Research in April and May 2016 and involved more than 1,096 companies across the globe. Forty-six percent of all companies interviewed said they intend to develop new IoT-based products and services (think driverless cars, smart metering for gas and power and remote monitoring for homes and industry to name a few) over the next two years. What is more interesting is that 63 percent of IoT adopters are seeing what they call “significant” returns on investment, up from 59 percent in last year’s Report.

The Barometer Report supports IDC’s prediction there will be approximately 30 billion connected things globally by 2020 – a $3 trillion global market opportunity. IDC has also predicted New Zealand will be APAC’s third most mature market in terms of IoT units per capita by 2020, highlighting the agricultural sector as a key growth driver. For example, Kiwi company Blackhawk Tracking (working with Vodafone) is taking advantage of IoT capability to ensure driver safety for farmers in remote locations. Should a driver flip on a quad bike or similar, an SOS is automatically sent over the cellular network to assist emergency services and search and rescue.

Vodafone New Zealand’s IoT Manager Scott Pollard said Kiwi companies investing in IoT innovation are facing big global market opportunities.

“Three-quarters of the companies surveyed in the 2016 IoT Barometer report now recognise IoT is a new industrial revolution that will change how people work and live forever.

Keith Oliver, executive chairman of Blackhawk Tracking agrees international opportunities are increasing for Kiwi technology companies investing in IoT innovation.

“We have fielded interest from a range of overseas businesses including major ski resorts in North America and value-add-resellers who are looking to provide the service to their customers under their own brand,” Oliver said.

Oliver says that by working with Vodafone’s internationally compatible technology platform means Blackhawk Tracking is able to progress its international market opportunities quickly.

The Report also found that IoT technologies play a key role in mainstream business activities in an increasing number of companies. Highlights included:

• 48 percent of companies interviewed are using IoT technologies to support large-scale business transformation, rising to 61 percent in the Asia-Pacific region;
• 52 percent of consumer electronics companies interviewed are using IoT technologies as the basis for a new generation of applications for connected homes; and
• 46 percent of all companies interviewed said they intend to develop new IoT-based products and services over the next two years.

Download your report here: Barometer Report

The recent Epicor A/NZ Customer Summits gathered together more than 100 technology decision makers in Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland. Speaking to iStart at the end of the A/NZ tour Vince Randall, regional VP for ANZ and Malcolm Fox, VP of product marketing, said they were particularly impressed by the ways that Epicor’s platform was being used by their customers to grow and evolve. These customers are predominantly manufacturers but also feature a large aged care client base, and clients in the financial services, construction and music industries.

In New Zealand Randall commented that the customers they talked to were still seeing a lot of top line growth with businesses breaking in to new markets and expanding overseas. He said customers looking at how their software platform can help them to do that. “We’ve had a lot of manufacturers who are branching into services and it’s important that those software platforms don’t restrict that growth,” offered Fox as an illustration.

Conversely, in Australia, they are seeing a lot of margin growth, for example, a Melburnian family business in the quarry industry has been growing by buying up competitors’ quarries. Its technology focus has been on integrating its acquisitions: “They have been able to wrap those organisations in the Epicor platform very easily,” Randall said.

And these businesses are indeed transforming – some every few years, and some every few months or even weeks. What is interesting, however, is that there was still a great deal of talk about the cloud and mobility at the Customer Summit, especially in New Zealand. While all of the customers had virtualised many had not yet made the leap to the cloud.

“They are looking to Epicor for help on cloud and mobilty technology. They have all virtualised, using IaaS for everything outside of the business systems,” explained Randal, who, along with Fox, was surprised the conversation had taken this long to eventuate.

“I think there is a tendency in our industry to latch on to cool stuff because it is trendy and then you come to customer days and you see these people in manufacturing who are struggling to extract their data from Excel and there we are talking about big data,” said Fox, noting the disconnect between the trendy technology and its adoption by more conservative industries. “For a manufacturer to move its ERP to cloud you are taking the heart of their organisation,” said Fox.

Despite this apparent reticence to adopt the newest shiny thing, technology as a business strategy is moving up the management ladder and there were more CFOs present at the customer days than CIOs. “What is becoming clear is that some of these more distant trends and concepts that we have been talking about for a long time are now resonating with customers and Epicor is able to help them drive the growth,” said Fox.

Something else that Randall and Fox noticed during the tour is just how loyal the Epicor customer base seems to be, despite the massive organisational changes that many of them have gone through. “We are very proud that the Epricor customer base has been very loyal and has been able to reinvent themselves,” said Randall highlighting one customer who has been running Epicor the past 16 years.

After selling their tourism booking software, BookIt, to TradeMe in 2010 and getting it bedded down with its new owners, Ryan Baker and his business partner Andrew Schofield, found themselves “helpless entrepreneurs and pretty unemployable”. Luckily they had a bunch of other ideas on the backburner. Fast forward seven years, and they have just missed out on winning the NZ Hi Tech Awards Duncan Cotterill Innovative Hi-Tech Software Product category with Timely, their scheduling software for the beauty and well-being industries.

Timely’s competition in the category included Orion Health, Vend and Movio, who ultimately won the award. Baker and Schofield who have been at six Hi Tech Awards finalists’ evenings with BookIt and Timely combined, and the guys from Movio were also serial finalists – it gives Baker hope he says. “We know we have a really good product. Our Net Promoter Score is in the mid-60s,” he says of Timely. (For the uninitiated, any net promoter score of above 50 is considered excellent while a poor score can reach negative numbers.)

Timely, which launched three years ago and has the financial backing of tech investors Rowan Simpson and Lance Wiggs, primarily serves the beauty and well-being industries, not because Baker and Schofield had a penchant for a good blow-dry and mani-pedi, but because they spotted a trend way back when they were running BookIt. “We had a bunch of beauty spas and hair salons asking to use our tourism booking product and we couldn’t’ understand why and then we looked at the other options available,” says Baker. Enough said.

When they launched, Baker said they intentionally put the product in the market without specifying which industry it was for. “We waited to see who loved it,” he said. Today Timely has 6000 global business customers, about 60 percent of whom are from the beauty and well-being industries. Unlike BookIt, Timely took two laptops, an internet connection and six months to develop and launch as a global business on day one, thanks to the arrival of cloud computing. Ten years ago, things were quite different. It took the pair 18 months to produce their first BookIt product and before they could even begin coding they had to scrape together $5000 for a server.

Times have changed significantly in the tech start up space however, Baker thinks the biggest challenge by far remains that of generating product awareness. Timely is well-loved by its users and a third of its sales are through word of mouth referrals, with another third coming from organic search. Baker says that being a global company is a double edged sword. “The opportunity for us is that it is a global market and we can sell all around the world but the other side of that is that we have competitors all around the world,” he said. In his experience, however, people don’t buy based on location, they buy because they like the experience. And Timely has 500 resellers globally who are trained and ready to meet the more traditional buyer who wants a face-to-face meeting.

On that basis, Baker’s advice to other tech start-ups is to not get distracted and focus on their customer. “Something we do at Timely that is a little different is that we obsess about our customer and nothing else. I think in the industry there are a lot of distractions and I see a lot of founders focusing too much on our industry and whether investors love it.”

He added that sometimes you have to say ‘no’ to things, including investment from venture capitalists if it is not the right time or the right deal. “Some of the hype around the VC market is not adding the value we would want it to. Write your pitch deck for your customer, think about your customer, if your customers love you and investors will come,” he advises.

Ex-Fisher & Paykel executive Anthony Belsham has been in the top job at Fronde for seven months so far, and already the company has returned to a $1.4 million pre-tax profit. This is opposed to the previous year’s significant loss which was swiftly followed by the departure of the previous CEO. There has been plenty of industry rumour and speculation about Clarke’s departure, which Belsham admitted was “probably a mutual decision”. Clarke had been with the company for 16 years and CEO for eight of those, and the official line is that it was time to allow a fresh perspective at the helm. Asked his thoughts on the matter, Belsham maintained that part of company’s turn-around is the result of the transition begun by Clarke, who still has an eight percent shareholding in the company.

This was a sentiment echoed by Chairman of Fronde Jon Mayson in his statement when Clarke stepped down a year ago: “He had the vision to recognise seven years ago the opportunity that cloud computing would have for Fronde and the disruption it would have for the market. Under Clarke’s leadership, Fronde quickly became the market leader in cloud integration, taking enterprise and government to the cloud. He also cemented Fronde’s position through key partnerships with Google, Salesforce, NetSuite, AWS and Citrix.” Mayson added that Clarke was instrumental to the near doubling of Fronde Australia’s revenue in 2014.

According to Belsham, much of the financial loss for FY 2014-15 was an accident of timing. He said that Clarke had seen the writing on the wall for bespoke large-scale enterprise and government projects and began to make the requisite investments and changes to the company structure. The government contracts, however, dried up faster than expected and left the business in trouble. “At the start of last year we had to address some of that management overhead. When I came into the business I had to get the capacity mix right,” explained Belsham.

But reseller margins are notoriously slim these days, and all the more so on SaaS products, so how, iStart wondered, is Fronde making money? Today Fronde is going out with a new story, pitching itself as an end-to-end solution provider, focused on providing business outcomes. “A lot of technology companies are focused on just providing the technology and Fronde has probably been guilty of that in the past. We now focus on the business outcomes,” he explained. That’s not to say it is trying to be a Deloitte or McKinsey, Belsham asserted, but it is trying to offer more than just a simple coding and implementation service by identifying other business opportunities that it can help with.

Belsham offered one unnamed example customer of this extended service, whom he described as being “in the utilities space”.  Fronde had previously built them a custom SaaS solution with all the promises that SaaS brings with it, but, after a more wide ranging conversation with the business discovered that it was grappling with 800 legacy applications.

“The promise of the cloud apps that will fix everything is really interesting but when you actually look at it there is all these legacy applications that don’t integrate. These cloud solutions can make it worse,” he said. As a result Fronde is now building them a roadmap for managing these applications and to get the best out them. “It’s leading to quite different outcomes,” he said, adding that these ongoing partnerships and real relationships with customers means recurring business.

“I think we have well and truly come through that difficult period. I think there was lots of speculation but we’ve got a great strategy and lots of really exciting opportunities,” he concluded.

Fronde has seen 19 percent growth in Australia last year and has big plans to grow further, with an aspiration to be a $100 million business (it is currently sitting at $57 million) within the next three years.

This morning Education Minister Hekia Parata announced that “digital technology is to be formally integrated into the New Zealand Curriculum and Te Marautanga o Aotearoa”. In her announcement she said that the change “will ensure that we have an education system that prepares children and young people for a future where digital fluency will be critical for success”.

The study of digital technologies and computational thinking will be expanded in the curriculum from senior secondary (where it currently resides) right down to Year 1. It will not, however, become a separate subject and looks like it will continue to be taught alongside vocational subjects such as hard materials, food technology and textiles (the old woodwork, metalwork, cooking and sewing).

She made her announcement at the NZTech Advance Education Technology Summit taking place in Auckland today. NZTech chief executive Graeme Muller took a diplomatic approach to the announcement: “NZTech is excited the Government is adding a digital tech section across all streams of curricula. This is a great step forward, but it is only the first step.”

Muller also said he looks forward to hearing how the government plans to invest in supporting teachers and school leaders so they have the skills and resources to prepare the future workforce. “The aspirational aim is to have all NZ schools able to offer digital technologies to all students by 2018,” he added.

The announcement has provoked a strong reaction from other members of the tech sector, who are not best pleased with the lack of urgency and progress.

Orion Health’s outspoken CEO Ian McCrae, who has been championing the need for improvements in our education system for many years, has slammed the announcement as “a missed opportunity”.

“It is disappointing to have waited so long for so little.” McCrae said in a statement. “What the tech industry asked for is Digital Technology to be separated from woodwork, metalwork, cookery and sewing and to become a separate learning area. That hasn’t happened. We said Digital Technology needed to become an academic subject on a par with maths and physics. That hasn’t happened.  And we wanted a major change to the curriculum so that it actually taught secondary school students how to code, rather than how to create a power point presentation. That hasn’t happened either.

“What the tech industry asked for is Digital Technology to be separated from woodwork, metalwork, cookery and sewing and to become a separate learning area.”

“There were many other excellent recommendations made during the 12 month review which have all been ignored. This calls into question the point of any consultation,” he blasted.

The comments reflect the frustration felt by McCrae and many like him in the technology sector after six years of waiting, a 12 month review process, and seven months of deliberation by the Ministry for what amounts to minimal changes in the treatment of technology in our school curriculum – and a lot of seemingly ignored advice.

These sentiments are shared by IITP CEO Paul Matthews, although he was a little more restrained in his statement, which said the IITP welcomes the expansion of digital tech in schools but is disappointed the broader changes needed in the area “have apparently been dumped”.

“The Minister has stopped short of truly transforming tech education in schools by refusing to create a proper focused home for Digital Technologies in its own learning area , or significant additional funding for professional development for teachers. Experts have made it clear that both are necessary to achieve the educational transformation needed to prepare students for today’s digital world. The decision by the Minister to block this was disappointing,” he said.

“The vast majority of those participating in the review recognised that a transformational change was needed. The world has changed and we need to get serious about preparing our kids for their digital future,” Matthews says. “Digital Technologies needs its own home within the curriculum. Without this, the outcome announced today simply won’t get us where we need to go as a country.”

He continued: “The changes announced are something that should have been implemented from the start. The tech industry was looking for leadership, not two years of meetings and reviews. More urgency is needed if the Government is serious about positioning New Zealand for the real economic growth our industry can bring.”

The decision is the result of the Government’s Science and Society Strategic Plan ‘A Nation of Curious Minds: Te Whenua Hihiri i te Mahara’, which was launched in 2014. One of its key initiatives was to review the positioning and content of digital technology within the New Zealand Curriculum and Te Marautanga o Aotearoa. Minister Parata said that from now until the end of 2017, the Government will consult with stakeholders, design new curriculum content, and develop achievement objectives across the whole learner pathway. It will be fully integrated into the New Zealand Curriculum and Te Marautanga o Aotearoa in 2018.

“We didn’t expect to win and, in fact, one of the disadvantages of winning is that you can’t enter again. For us, it’s the process that is most important,” Simons told iStart, speaking after the winner’s announcement in Ohio earlier this month.

The ICF is a New-York based think tank which studies and analyses the broadband economy and how intelligent communities are adapting to, and seizing, the opportunities presented by technology. Each year it identifies and ranks the world’s most intelligent communities based on the six Intelligent Community Indicators: broadband, knowledge workforce, innovation, digital equality, sustainability, and advocacy.

Whanganui, which already featured on the Smart21 Communities list for the past three years in a row, was named a Top7 Intelligent Communities this year. While it may have been the only New Zealand entry it had considerable competition from far bigger communities around the world, including Hsinchu County, Taiwan; Mülheim an de Ruhr, Germany; New Taipei, Taiwan; Surrey, British Columbia, Canada; Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; and, eventual winner, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

The Top7 represent models of economic and social transformation in the 21st Century. The ICF describes them, saying: “They are not the most advanced technology centres, the most wired cities or the fastest growing economies in the world. Instead, each exemplifies best practices in broadband deployment and use, workforce development, innovation, digital inclusion and advocacy that offer lessons to regions, cities, towns and villages around the world. They are charting new paths to lasting prosperity for their citizens, businesses and institutions.”

Speaking to iStart, Simons said that it is the process of completing the Intelligent Communities framework that he had found most valuable because it forces the council to take stock of its digital efforts in a holistic and detailed manner.

“It forces the council to take stock of its digital efforts in a holistic and detailed manner.”

Because it requires you to provide specific information and measurements, you can clearly see your successes, deficiencies and track improvement. If you don’t already measure certain aspects, you can implement new regimes to capture that data for next year.

“The process gives you the tools to help you work out where you should focus your energy” he said, adding that it has helped the council to resist the temptation to do something that is perceived as “cool” in favour of projects that will make a real difference.

He gave the example of the public-private partnership with InspireNet to provide a free fixed wireless broadband trial to 60 Whanganui homes. “We saw it as council’s role to facilitate UFB in the region – we thought if we just left it to the providers Whanganui would be low on the priority list. By establishing the Digital Leaders Forum and the public-private partnership we gave a clear indication to government that we wanted to offer connectivity in Whanganui.” The initial pilot project had 100 percent take up within three hours and led to a wider partnership with InsipreNet which saw Whanganui become the first region to be fully connected to the UFB.

“We saw it as council’s role to facilitate UFB in the region – we thought if we just left it to the providers Whanganui would be low on the priority list.”

“That’s just one small example of how we as a council can facilitate connectivity for our community because that’s what is important to us,” said Simons. “If you do a whole bunch of things like that in a consistent framework or a consistent fashion then you get synergies from doing a whole bunch of related projects as opposed to a bunch of knee-jerk reactions.”

While not every community will want to go through the ICF programme Simons advocated for a “top-down” approach to technology and a clear digital strategy for what they want to achieve as a community.

“One of the things that has worked really well for us is the Digital Leaders Forum which is council facilitated and has representatives from council, the health sector, sports sector, education sector etc,” he said.

Communities often don’t have access to the commercial expertise they need and that is where the council can act as a facilitator.

“Bringing that business focus is key but you are having a social impact. You are effecting 45,000 people. That’s a real buzz,” he concluded.

Originally the creators of the eponymous customer support SaaS product, Freshdesk has responded to its sales team and customer needs, this week launching the cloud-based Freshsales CRM globally.

The CRM market is a crowded one but Sreelesh Pillai, General Manager of Freshdesk Australia told iStart the majority of the tools on the market are built for managers, not sales reps. “We built Freshsales because there was a gap in the market for a solution that was easy to use for the entire sales team without costly integrations.”

“We built Freshsales because there was a gap in the market for a solution that was easy to use for the entire sales team without costly integrations.”

He described his company’s needs, for which the system was originally built, as “fairly basic like most fast-growing SaaS companies, saying they needed sales campaigns, email tracking, and web event analytics. “But we were unable to find a single tool to fill those needs. We decided to build Freshsales and along the way also heard from existing customers about how much they would like to see Freshdesk build a CRM solution. We expect many of those customers to be early adopters.”

The new platform includes all the standard CRM features, plus built-in phone and email; lead scoring; user behaviour tracking; a visual sales pipeline; contact, lead, deal and account management; and reports. It’s also accessible through iOS and Android apps.

If you haven’t heard of Freshdesk that’s because most of its sales happen organically online or through word-of-mouth recommendations, says Pillai. This year it was the only company to be added to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Centre. Today it has 80,000 customers world-wide, including 5000 in Australia and New Zealand. “When we launched Freshdesk in 2010, our very first customer was from Perth, Australia,” Pillai added.

“Much like our other products — Freshdesk, Freshservice and Hotline.io — Freshsales will be found and sold online, but has the potential to grow even faster with the support from the team in Sydney and our partners across Australia,” he said.

Freshdesk’s suite of products now includes the flagship product, Freshdesk, a cloud-based software solution that allows organisations to support customers through email, phone, websites, forums, and social media; Freshservice, a cloud-based service desk and IT service management solution; Hotline.io, an in-app support and engagement platform for mobile-first businesses; and now Freshsales.

Microsoft’s deal to buy LinkedIn may have taken up all the column inches last week, but the addition of field services and sensors integration to Dynamics CRM as part of its recent ‘Spring Wave’ releases also caught our interest. In an age where data is ubiquitous, it’s what you do with it that counts, so the new features are designed to help business users to offer predictive service capabilities. Features in this release include an “end-to-end service solution, including new field service capabilities; enhanced portal capabilities to better connect and share information with customers, partners, and employees; and embedded machine learning and Internet of Things scenarios that harness the power of Microsoft Azure to anticipate a customer’s unspoken needs, triage incoming social posts and provide predictive service.”

So far, so much jargon.

To help interpret the hyperbole, none other than Rolls Royce was on hand at the ‘Spring Wave’ launch to translate that into practical terms.

Nick Farrant, Senior VP at Rolls Royce, walked users through how the company is using Microsoft Azure, Dynamics CRM, Cortana and the Azure IoT Suite to offer an improved service to its customers. He presented a vision of how the aviation industry could collaborate to provide a better service to the whole industry by using big data and machine learning.

“The industry does not have a shortage of data,” he said, “the industry has a shortage of insight – it’s a lack of consistent information in the same place being managed, analysed and visualised in the same manner.”

Rolls Royce has been collaborating with Microsoft so that in the future it will be able to offer predictive services to its customers. Ultimately airline customers want their flights to be safe and on time, and traditionally there is a lot of activity behind the scenes to make sure this is the case. Rolls Royce wants to help to reduce the stress of this activity.

Taking the example of an under-efficient aeroplane engine, Farrant described how Rolls Royce will be able to use IoT sensor data and analytics to identify a possible underperformance issue. Although this is not an imminent safety hazard and the engine could go on happily functioning until its next scheduled maintenance, money can be saved by fixing it earlier. Using linkages with Dynamics CRM the system can identify when the aeroplane is next scheduled to fly and whether there are the time and people resources available on site for preventative maintenance to take place prior to take off. It can then go further, assigning those resources to the job, then providing further information and diagrams to help the maintenance crew identify the solution to the problem.

“Millions and millions of tonnes of fuel could be saved per year in the aviation industry through efficiency,” Farrant said, underlining the huge fiscal impact that such predictive maintenance can achieve.

Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive VP for cloud and enterprise, who made the Spring Wave announcement called this proactive, predictive model of doing business “intelligent customer engagement”.

“Integrating your additional data and insights from these millions of IoT devices into your business processes will transform your organisation even further,” he said.

Speaking to iStart after the launch, local APAC Microsoft expert Raj Raguneethan, said that these integrated IoT capabilities and new field services will have a massive impact on the Dynamics solution and are a major area of focus for Microsoft.

He explained that the field services portion was originally a product called Field One, which Microsoft acquired a year ago. Since then the software giant has integrated the service with the rest of the Dynamics CRM stack so that it is available out-of-the-box. Because of this integration, resources shared across multiple areas (eg field services, project management etc) can be easily allocated without the fear of double-booking.

The impetus for the purchase was in response to Microsoft’s customers wanting new ways to differentiate their businesses and field services are one way that can be done. He said that rather than focusing on a specific vertical, Microsoft thinks that any business in the area of predictive maintenance will benefit from it – for example, any public services, utilities, power companies or telcos would be a natural fit. He added that Microsoft is already seeing a significant interest in the field services capabilities.

Chuah has laid out his plans for a more digitally savvy health service that will see him appoint a chief technology and digital services officer at the Ministry of Health. “We recognise that information and technology lie at the heart of the future health of New Zealand, and of New Zealanders,” he told iStart.

The new technology and digital focused role “will play a key role in the Ministry’s executive leadership team” and will be “the single point of contact and accountability for delivering technology services to the Ministry and for the health and disability system’s technology and digital delivery,” Chuah explained.

He unveiled his plans in a presentation to an invited group of New Zealand Health IT (NZHIT) members and stakeholders in April, and expects to announce the successful candidate in early July – in the interim, Giles Southwell is acting in the role.

Scott Arrol, CEO and director of NZHIT, said he is very encouraged by the move to appoint a technology representative at a tier two management level, reporting to the director general himself.

“IT and technology are being clearly positioned across the health sector,” he said, also commenting that the role’s title suggests that it will be much broader than a purely technical role, important as health is still about “great people doing great stuff for other people” but IT is the key enabler.

Asked if the move to promote technology to the top level of management is several years late, Arrol said he did not think so. “The stage that we are at now, it’s the right time to be doing what Chai Chuah is doing. The groundwork has been done in the past to enable these senior appointments to be made,” he said, referring to the establishment of the Health IT Board five years ago which has helped to create a single view of technology in the health sector.

Rod Hall, a member of NZHIT, was of a slightly different opinion. “I think for the whole health sector that this is a vital and overdue role given the pace of change of technology,” he said. “For the Ministry to recognise a clear focus on that sort of role is really important.” He also noted that it was interesting how the new role only came about once a new director general of health was appointed – one who has “a canny grasp on technology”.

“Today, a lot of the government agencies including health need to focus on improving efficiencies through technology,” he said.

For Arrol, if there is one thing that he would like to see come out of the appointment, it is an alignment across the sector when it comes to technology. “There is a lot of fragmentation in approach and if we can start to get some alignment in what’s happening – what systems, what solutions when it comes to technology – then that would be good,” said Arrol.

The appointment is part of the redesigned executive leadership team which Chuah has fashioned in response to the reinvigorated New Zealand Health Strategy that will be implemented over the next 10 years. The health strategy intends to give citizens easy access to their health and social services using electronic records and patient portals. It identified the need to collect and share data consistently to avoid inaccuracy and duplication and to better direct health resources and services to areas of need. It also recognised the importance of keeping up with developing technologies such as robotics, genomics and nanotechnology in terms of its potential impact on our health system.

To achieve this Chuah said: “We want to elevate the focus on the system’s technology and digital systems and infrastructure to the executive level, and develop and drive the system’s technology and digital architecture, standards and systems agenda, as well as building the system’s technology and digital delivery capabilities for the purpose of enhancing customer outcomes.

“I expect this role to take a future focus on the trends in technology (five years and beyond) and scan the broader technology landscape, including but not limited to genetech, biotech, nanotech, robotics and advanced computing and analytics.”

Arrol said: “I support what Chai is doing because he is not just talking the talk – he is taking a leadership role in the changes that have to be made across the board. He has thrown down a gauntlet to us and challenged us to be part of the change.”

Estonia is a small country with no natural resources and a desire to keep taxes low, so it needed to find a way for government to be more efficient, explained Siim Sikkut, the digital advisor to the Prime Minister of Estonia is his international keynote speech at this year’s CIO Summit in Auckland last week. Sikkut had the audience marvelling at what a country of just 1.3 million people can do with technology when it sets its mind to it.

Fifteen years ago the Estonian government started to experiment with digital technology to make life in Estonia better and more efficient. Today all Estonians have a digital ID embedded in their smartphone SIM cards, they have digital signatures for everything including parliamentary bills, you can start up a legally functioning company in 20 minutes, 96 percent of people pay their taxes online in under three minutes, health records are electronic and prescriptions digital, and one third of voting is done online. It’s digital transformation on steroids.

For Vernon Turner, IDC’s world-wide guru on enterprise systems and the Internet of Things (IoT), digital transformation and the IoT go hand in hand. “To have digital transformation you have to have data,” he said, speaking to iStart ahead of his closing keynote speech at this year’s CIO Summit. The difficulty comes in how to take that information from different places and analyse it in a meaningful manner. This is where he thinks the next market share battle ground will be – in platforms that can aggregate, analyse and prioritise data. For now data is still confined to “stovepipes” of information that cannot be easily shared, but he said we are starting to see a middle layer coming into play to help federate, analyse and otherwise use the data meaningfully.

“To have digital transformation you have to have data,”

The Estonian Government has this use of data down pat. All of its digital services are underpinned by X-Road, the national data exchange platform, which is a layer of technology that connects the whole of Government and parts of the private sector together. And all this only costs one percent of the government budget because X-Road APIs can be used and re-used to quickly and efficiently create new services. The Government even launches new services in beta so that it can continue production in response to feedback from citizen users. This speeds up the time to market but requires a large amount of trust in the people handling your data.

It’s all about “efficient and effective government”, Sikkut said in his address. The underlying ethos is the ‘once only’ rule – if the Government already knows something about you, it should not have to ask you twice. To some that might sound like Utopia, but to others it might sound scary. Sikkut assured that there are strict rules around who can access your data and for what reason, with the whole system being consent-based. “The people own the data – always. I can see who has been accessing my data – and if they have no reason to I can complain,” says Sikkut, adding that a couple of doctors have already been punished for accessing patient notes they had no business with.

“The people own the data – always. I can see who has been accessing my data – and if they have no reason to I can complain.”

Another part of the Government’s efficiency is reflected in how it works with the private sector rather than employing developers directly. Sikkut said (almost jokingly) that it’s like a government business growth initiative because the Government is getting what it needs for its citizens while also helping the private sector to grow. It’s something that other governments and muncipalities could do to emulate, according to Turner, who offered another example of how the city of Paolo Alto’s CIO has created an open data platform that has made all the movements of vehicles, traffic light signals, road incidents and the like freely available to those who want to use it. As a result, every global car manufacturer has a lab in the city to experiment with driverless cars. By making it a natural private-public venture it both benefits society and drives the economy, he said.

Perhaps most astounding of all, is the Estonian Government’s launch of what is essentially country-as-a-service. Anyone, no matter where they are in the world, can become an e-resident of Estonia which means that they can set up a secure digital identity similar to the digital identity linked to Estonian citizens’ ID card or ID SIM card. While it does not confer citizenship or residency it does allow holders to use the services provided by Estonian state agencies and the private sector which are usually connected to the ID card. The aim is to create a borderless digital society with 10 million e-residents by 2025.

Asked if the Estonian Government has been able to make better decisions thanks to all the data at its fingertips, Sikkut admitted “not as much as I would like – but we are starting to play around with data and do some modelling with taxes and predict how certain industries will go”.

There’s always opportunity for improvement when you’ve got technology on your side.

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