Raymond Dickinson, SailPoint New Zealand country manager says identity security is no longer a technical control and just a layer of defence in a multi-layered stack. Today, it’s the organising principle of cyber resilience.

“Every user, system, device and process now relies on identity as their control point,” he says.

“You’ve really got to start looking at what is the unique area you do have control over, and that’s identity – because every person has an identity that needs to be managed. Every machine has an account or identity that needs to be managed. Every agent has one as well.”

“Identity security has shifted from being a technical control to the organising principle of cyber resilience.”

The shift is being driven by the decentralisation of IT. With users connecting directly to cloud services and software-as-a-service platforms – often outside the purview of IT – traditional perimeter-based security is no longer enough. Identity is the new perimeter.

By managing identity properly, organisations can enforce least privilege and reduce the risk of breach while also reducing damage should a breach occur.

“The lower the amount of access someone has means when there is a breach, you’re really reducing the amount of damage that is going to happen to an organisation.”

Many organisations, though, are still grappling with the basics.

SailPoint’s latest Horizons of Identity Security report shows 63 percent of organisations globally are still stuck in basic identity maturity. Dickinson says in New Zealand and, to a lesser extent Australia, may be even further behind.

“A lot of organisations here are still looking at the very early stages of identity and access management – they’re still really looking at multifactor identification (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO) – so we are in many cases a long way behind.”

He says many organisations still don’t realise the importance of identity governance and how it can uplift their cybersecurity maturity.

“They still seem to think that your average Microsoft Active Directory group is enough to achieve a lot of these outcomes. And it’s just not. It can’t give them the control, the governance and that real uplift that you get from a mature enterprise-wide identity security platform.”

Identity as a productivity engine

While identity security is critical for reducing risk, Dickinson says it also delivers serious business benefits, especially when it comes to productivity.

Automating joiner-mover-leaver processes mean new staff get access faster, internal moves are seamless and leavers are properly offboarded, cutting down on licence waste and security gaps.

“The leaver one is super important so you can ensure all their access has been revoked and you’re not having an account that is still active and may not be adhering to password policies and so on. It’s a key area where a lot of money and time is saved.”

Meanwhile, faster onboarding and provisioning means new hires and contractors can hit the ground running – improving customer experience and accelerating project delivery.

“Security often gets blamed for slowing things down,” Dickinson says. “But identity governance actually speeds things up. It’s a win-win.”

Automating user access reviews is also a key business benefit gained from identity security – bolstering accuracy while also reducing time.

“One organisation spent six months of the year going through doing access reviews, and then after six months, they start the next one. It’s a lot of time and effort that goes into sorting these things out.”

With identity governance, that becomes a continuous, automated process.

The benefits extend to cost savings too. With SaaS use exploding, many organisations are unknowingly paying for licenses tied to inactive accounts. Identity governance helps eliminate that waste revoking access as soon as someone leaves.

Despite the benefits, many organisations are still exposed. Over-provisioned access, unmanaged SaaS and shadow IT are common culprits, but one of the biggest risks is third-party access, Dickinson says, pointing to recent high-profile third-party breaches.

“Visibility over third parties is a critical gap. It’s an area where a lot of organisations still have someone manually managing the onboarding process and it’s just held in a spreadsheet.”

That opens the doors for people having too much access to systems, and accounts not being removed later on.

“It’s becoming a real issue for most people and it’s a real challenge for retail as well, because they have a lot of transient workers coming through and managing the onboarding and offboarding of those individuals is really hard.”

Machine identities and bots are another emerging threat as attackers increasingly target non-human accounts, increasing the critical need for visibility and governance.

Making the case to the C-suite

So how can businesses convince stakeholders outside of IT, such as the CFO, COO and risk managers, that identity security is worth the investment?

Dickinson says it’s not an easy sell unless you’ve got someone who has prior experience with identity governance.

“If they don’t there’s a lot of learning that needs to be done through that journey. It comes back to that lack of awareness and education within a lot of companies about the value of what identity governance can actually do for them.

“It’s the chicken and egg scenario – they haven’t seen it before so they don’t think it can achieve the objectives or outcomes.You’ve got to educate them before they’re actually ready to move forward.”

For many organisations, compliance is the lever that gets identity governance over the line.

“If they’re missing or failing compliance audits, that’s when [they say] ‘we have to get this done’.”

He recommends three key steps for building a compelling business case:

• Understand your cybersecurity objectives and frameworks

“Map those key framework controls back to how they link to an identity security platform… that will help you articulate back to the business why you need to invest.”

• Engage with other departments

“Go and talk to the CFO, go and talk to the head of risk. Understand their challenges. Look at how you can map them back to an identity security platform.”

• Quantify the value

“Sit down and understand what your current processes look like and what they are costing you today. If you were to put in a new identity security platform, what savings can be achieved?”

Even if the investment is net neutral, Dickinson says most business leaders will support a project that accelerates operations.

“Most business owners go ‘That’s great, so we’re going to do a security project that’s net neutral when most others cost a lot of money!’”

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No surprise then that Dickinson, who is New Zealand country manager at SailPoint, says identity security is the ‘secret sauce’ of transformation for government, enabling secure, efficient citizen-centric services while reducing risk and complexity behind the scenes.

As agencies adapt to a world of closer collaboration between departments, hybrid workforces and an expanding network of third-party partners, the role of identity security and governance has never been more important.

“It mitigates the risk and prevents [staff] becoming a conduit for criminal activity”

“Here in New Zealand organisations are more worried about making sure no one can get through the front door, rather than actually understanding who has access to what inside the organisation,” he says. “That’s where identity governance comes in – it’s about controlling the inside as much as the outside.”

In practical terms, identity security can provide government agencies (and businesses) with seamless on- and off-boarding of staff, including contractors and third parties; and ensure the right access – and no more – is provisioned at the right time to improve productivity and reduce risk exposure through lingering or inappropriate access.

It’s also a driver for government operational efficiency, enabling self-service, and minimising the errors and support tickets which can often result from manual provisioning.

Dickinson says that when agencies automate these processes, onboarding times shorten, disruptions drop away, and resources can be used where they’re most needed across the organisation.

Automated policy enforcement supports regulatory compliance around legislation such as the Privacy Act and Public Records Act, as well as streamlining audit readiness with transparent access, logs and even attestation trails.

“Plus there are a lot of other things around segregation of duties, providing strong oversight of who can view or change sensitive information,” he adds.

A recent New Zealand Ministerial Advisory Group warned that transnational, serious and organised crime is increasing the threat for New Zealand, particularly where insiders exploit access to sensitive systems.  Dickinson says weak access governance doesn’t just enable mistakes, it provides the foothold to cause real damage.

“Strong identity security and governance are essential to prevent insiders becoming conduits for criminal activities, which is what we have been seeing in New Zealand recently.”

Recent reports have highlighted how private sector employees in ports and airports have been compromised, with ‘rip-on, rip-off’ methods where trusted insiders are used to help retrieve concealed shipments before customs inspections.

“If these staff don’t have access to do these things, it mitigates the risk and prevents them becoming a conduit for criminal activity,” he says.

“Identity security ensures that only the right people have the right access to the right systems at the right time and this prevents breaches, data leaks and insider threats, and enforces least privilege and zero trust principles.”

Anomalies in user behaviour and access patterns can also be quickly detected.

Critically, Dickinson believes identity security has a major role to play in improving public trust in government services – an area where all governments are feeling the heat.

“If you’re getting it right when you’re on-boarding or off-boarding an employee, it has a massive flow on effect all the way through to public trust because citizens want to know their data is well protected.”

Identity security gaps

But New Zealand, he says, is behind its peers in many ways. He notes that Australia has long recognised identity governance as a core digital infrastructure, something that has been reflected in its strategic approach to national cyber resilience, public sector reform and digital trust.

“Here in New Zealand, we’ve been slower to adopt this mindset and it has left us with a bit of a gap in several areas, one of those being regulatory pressure – we just don’t have those controls in place here like they do in Australia,” he says alluding to the likes of Australia’s Essential Eight maturity model of mitigation strategies, recommended by the Australian Signals Directorate.

Budgeting and resourcing constraints are also hampering identity security among Kiwi government agencies, Dickinson says. Many don’t understand how critical identity platforms are to their entire organisation and, as such, they aren’t budgeting appropriately to implement this critical capability.

“In Australia, they have  larger budgets and understand the criticality of identity security , so they are adopting the capability earlier than here in New Zealand.”

Dickinson points to New South Wales’ Department of Customer Service’s (DCS) transformation as an example New Zealand can learn from.

The NSW Government has committed to becoming the world’s ‘leading customer-centric government’ by 2030, with the DCS, which is responsible for delivering customer service, digital transformation and regulatory reform, at the vanguard for the transformation.

It is, Dickinson says, a great example of an agency which sees identity as a key part of digital transformation.

“They place identity security at the core of their service delivery. They’ve recognised that secure, seamless identity is essential to enabling digital services at scale and have invested in robust identity governance and access management as foundational infrastructure, not just as a security function.”

Rather than siloed systems, NSW has built shared platforms across the agencies, reducing costs, improving interoperability and creating consistent experiences. Cybersecurity and digital policies have been integrated and Dickinson says they measured success in trust and usage.

“The result has been higher citizen uptake for NSW, improved operational efficiency and increased public trust in the government services, which is a great outcome for any government agency.”

The automation and AI factor

Of course, we can’t not mention AI and automation.

Dickinson says they have a huge role to play in helping reduce identity related attacks while improving service delivery.

“At the end of the day an identity platform is all about automation and the key ones are removing human error and taking away manual activities across the organisation.”

Automation ensures processes are executed consistently and in real time, reducing the risk of forgotten accounts, over-provisioned access or delays in removing access.

Service delivery and user experience are enhanced with automated self-service access to requests and approvals, and can go further, automating many of the processes within an organisation.

“It is very wide reaching when you start looking at identity.”

AI and machine learning, meanwhile, can provide the information required to identify areas of excess access – something that would previously be done in spreadsheets, taking hours of data manipulation.

Putting identity security into practice

When it comes to getting an organisation to treat identity as foundational infrastructure, Dickinson has three key recommendations – and it starts with getting executive buy-in.

“This is going to be a transformation and a program of work that is going to take a number of years, so having executive support is important.”

It’s also a change that will impact many areas within the organisation, necessitating wide involvement. And, of course, there’s the funding element which makes executive support critical.

Establishing an identity governance framework to define the policies for life cycle management, role design, access reviews and certifications, is also important.

“Get those done and you’re heading in a good direction.”

Lastly, he urges organisations to ensure they have identity built into their broader security and information initiatives – and to build the frameworks early to ensure the right outcomes for the organisation.

“Identity governance isn’t a passing concern; it’s a permanent requirement. Cyber breaches are not going away, and delaying action only increases your organisation’s exposure. The earlier you begin this journey, the faster you’ll reach a secure, sustainable outcome. Waiting due to uncertainty doesn’t eliminate the challenge, it only heightens the risk for the organisation you’re entrusted to protect.”

SailPoint has recently released its Horizons of Identity Security 2025–2026 report. To explore the findings and see where your organisation stands, download the report here (note that your human-ness will be checked!).

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“There’s no such thing as an IT project. Everything is a business project, some just have an IT component.”

AI’s potential and projects in play

Anthony Cipolla, COSOL AI lead, says there are many exciting case studies emerging across asset-centric industries in Australia and Asia Pacific.

“Some of our customers in transport and logistics are doing some really interesting things at the moment,” he says.

“We know technology leaders who are leaning into robotics, automation and AI to manage how equipment, resources and people move around on their sites. They’re also looking to use AI to improve workflows and rosters for staff, there’s training and career development use cases, and tools to optimise space for greater utility; there’s a lot of potential.”

Cipolla says there are also great applications in other site-centric cases and some teams are using computer vision for stockpile assessment or worksite safety and compliance.

For Rolf Samonte, head of ICT & Cyber Security for Metro Trains Sydney, enabling the AI opportunity for line maintenance has been a focus. The company, which operates and maintains the Sydney Metro M1 Northwest & Bankstown Line, has already taken steps to plan for success.

“I think one of the key enablers for success with AI for us is that we have established the AI steering committee, headed by our CEO. The leadership buy-in is really driving the initiatives to come forward,” he says.

“Where AI could fit for us is around smarter maintenance, whether it’s using IoT and bringing that data into our ERP system and then getting the trends out of that so that we can work safer, smarter and more efficiently.”

Alinta Energy’s Chris Pratt, general manager for Energy Supply Technology, pointed out that prediction and forecasting were core pillars of an energy utility’s work to ensure grids functioned properly. This is a space where data is fundamental and AI’s potential is high.

“It all comes down to prediction,” he says. “What is our demand going to be at five o’clock tomorrow, when everyone comes home? What’s the weather forecast going to be at five o’clock. What’s the price of the energy market going to be?”

Alinta is using machine learning in the trading space to understand and determine demand. “We can also harvest the data we have available to extract better information, which results in better outcomes for industry.”

Being able to predict demand can enable a generator to be turned on half an hour earlier, or a cheaper generator put on, resulting in lower overall prices, Pratt says.

“There is also technology we are rolling out now where a customer will call up, and AI will be able to identify that customer and what they might be calling about for the call centre operator, providing faster answers to customers.”

Fiona Love, general manager for Workforce Development at the Australasian Railway Association, was bullish about the impact AI would have on asset management. Love sees optimisation potential in rostering and other areas to drive efficiencies on site and, in particular, improve conditions and bolster the workforce.

“Clearly asset management maintenance is where AI can play a huge role,” she says. “One area I think about is that we want to have a much more diverse workforce. There are of course shortages in talent we’re dealing with, whether it’s in design, construction, operations or maintenance.

“However, the way rosters are currently designed means they will never work for a lot of women out there. AI can potentially help us a lot with some of those factors, because you can bring a lot of non-linear, social, emotional lifestyle factors into an AI model to help it work through.”

Prominent challenges

Another challenge the roundtable group acknowledged was resistance to change. While not exclusive to mining, this barrier to transformation can be particularly strong where big, high-value operators with long legacies are laser-focused on their core operations. Mining is, however, expected to experience more transformation as new generations of workers move into the sector.

In utilities, Alinta Energy’s Pratt highlighted regulatory constraints as another challenge when trying to unlock insights through modern AI solutions.

“We’re subject to the security standards of critical infrastructure, so governments are very concerned about keeping the lights on and we ensure that components don’t get too cold or too hot. We take risk across operations and security seriously,” he said.

“We have a lot of obligations to our clients, we go through a lot of audits and have a lot of security, there are a lot of regulations around what we can and can’t do. For example, we can’t just go and buy an off the shelf AI solution. We have to put a lot of checks and balances and guardrails in place. That can have the effect of slowing a company down with respect to innovating.”

The group also highlighted the cybersecurity implications of AI.

“From a technology leadership standpoint, cybersecurity can present one of the most significant initial hurdles,” Cipolla said.

“As organisations embark on new initiatives, it’s crucial that they create secure boundaries and operate within protected environments. This ensures that sensitive information, whether it’s proprietary data or financial instruments, remains fully safeguarded.

“The foundation must be solid governance structures, comprehensive policies, and robust frameworks established from the outset.”

David Small, business unit executive for IBM, which develops the Maximo asset management solution, said stability and software security was often a point of conjecture between the desire to benefit from the latest technologies, including AI.

He notes there can be some resistance to upgrading among customers who have a stable version of their software, have worked with it, configured it and pushed the envelope with it, there can be some resistance to upgrading.

“While customers do want the latest and greatest and the AI that comes with it, there can be reservations from a stability point of view. When it is one of the core systems that’s running a business, and it’s operating quite well and stable, there is often apprehension among customers when weighing whether they should upgrade now to gain the benefits of the added AI tools and the latest version of the software vs continuing with the existing stable version.”

AI coding, literacy, and AI shyness

Event attendees also touched on literacy, and were conscientious about whether less experienced developers could properly evaluate what constituted good code once the AI does most of the heavy lifting.

“One of the challenges with AI is understanding AI and what we actually can do with it,” Pratt says. “I sometimes feel like it’s a hammer in search of the nail, and many seem to believe it can solve all of their problems very easily.”

He also pointed out that this literacy combined with the still early days of AI adoption also raises questions about whether it’s OK to use AI.

“Because AI is still new, the rules of how to use it and when are still being tested across all industries.”

A phenomenon, termed ‘GPT shame’ or ‘AI shaming’, refers to when businesses, employees and students use AI tools like ChatGPT to review, summarise and generate content but feel uncomfortable admitting this to their peers.

In a 2025 global study by the University of Melbourne and KPMG, 57 percent of employees admitted to hiding their use of AI tools like ChatGPT at work and presenting AI-generated content as their own, Cipolla notes.

This creates an interesting dynamic where executives might prefer not to know about widespread AI usage, even though it’s already happening across their organisations. The irony wasn’t lost on participants that while they sat discussing AI strategies, many of their teams were likely already using these tools to boost productivity.

Closing thoughts on managing change

Business transformation takes time, communication and understanding across organisations and industries. For asset-centric industries looking to walk then jog then run with AI, this means effective change management must also be one of the most important areas of focus.

This business-first view was shared by Paul Lee, IBM ANZ senior technical specialist for IBM Asset Lifecycle Management.

“There’s no such thing as an IT project. Everything is a business project, some just have an IT component,” he said.

“In the case of AI, organisations need to always be thinking about what the business problem is that they are trying to solve, or the business benefit they are trying to gain. You can explore those business cases with your technology partners to tease out the right AI implementation.”

To access more insights on AI from key asset management leaders, click here to download the whitepaper.

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“Identity security is an enabler for digital transformation. It is a foundation for cloud adoption, hybrid work and zero trust and enables you to transform your business so much faster,” says Dickinson, SailPoint New Zealand country leader.

“Without it, every project hits friction, risk or delay because teams just can’t move fast enough because at the end of the day, when people need to get access to the cloud there is an identity that needs access into that cloud.”

The discipline focuses on managing and protecting digital identities, ensuring the right people have the right access to the right resources at the right time and for the right reasons. It extends beyond just managing usernames and passwords, providing context aware, policy-driven controls enforcing a least-privilege access model for each digital identity.

While most local companies are currently managing cloud adoption manually, Dickinson says managing identity via a single tool enables cloud adoption to be dramatically sped up.

“Identity security is an enabler for digital transformation. It’s a foundation for cloud adoption, hybrid work and zero trust”

One area of identity security Dickinson believes has particularly big benefits for business and users alike is lifecycle management, or ‘joiner, mover leaver’, streamlining user on- and offboarding, improving productivity and creating a more secure, efficient and agile environment for businesses.

“It automates the processes of new hires to get the right access from day one, enabling them to be productive and feel like they are delivering value from day one, which has a huge user experience impact.”

That extends throughout their time with the organisation – if they change roles or are temporarily assigned to help another team, they can gain the access they need quickly and easily.

Access can be instantly deprovisioned when they leave the organisation.

Also included is the facility to enable users to self-service and for requests to be routed to the appropriate person for approval and for policies to be enforced; risk-based access controls to ensure dynamically based access is provisioned; and integration with MFA (multi-factor authentication) and single sign on to deliver strong authentication at the first log-on and simplify access across all apps.

Alongside the business transformation benefits are the cybersecurity benefits, protecting digital identities from unauthorised access, misuse and cyberattacks, and ensuring only authorised individuals and systems can access data and applications, helping prevent cyber risks including data breaches, account takeovers, and financial fraud.

Dickinson likens it to having a smart, evolving security guard at every digital door in your organisation, constantly checking who users are, what they should have access to, whether they are still authorised to be there and whether their behaviour is normal.

But while identity security has been a cornerstone of modern cybersecurity for several years, Dickinson says it remains one of the most overlooked areas for New Zealand organisations, with Kiwi organisations ‘significantly’ trailing Australian counterparts in identity security.

Part of that is down to the idea we’re not likely to be a target at the bottom of the world, and the ‘she’ll be right’ attitude, which he says has created complacency around cyberthreats, especially those originating from internal mismanagement, like identity misuse.

Adding to that complacency is the lack of regulation in New Zealand, compared to Australia, where regulatory risk drives greater cyber focus.

But Dickinson says even without the regulatory risk, there are plenty of good reasons for Kiwi businesses to be embracing identity security, including the business risks of doing nothing, with potential for data breaches from misused or excessive access.

“Without identity governance users – especially contractors and leavers – can often have too much access for far too long. Stolen credentials for insider misuse can go undetected and cause significant harm and that’s a risk we’ve seen here before.”

In the event of a breach, figuring out how someone got in, where they went, what they did also takes much longer without an identity security platform in place, Dickinson says.

SailPoint research suggests that every dollar invested in identity security delivers disproportionately higher returns. Unlike traditional cybersecurity spend which typically delivers linear returns, identity security spend can ‘bend the curve’, delivering more value than investments in other cyber capabilities, according to SailPoint’s Horizons of Identity Security 2024-2025 report.

Those disproportionately higher returns are observed through business value and productivity, alongside the higher risk reduction, with the report showing more advanced companies were seeing accelerated time to market and reduced friction, while productivity gains for mature identity security users were 22 percent higher than less mature organisations.

For organisations keen to get started in identity security – or to level up their existing identity security work – Dickinson says a key starting point is an identity maturity assessment to understand their current state, what is working, what is manual and where there are risks.

“Identity security is critical to any security strategy today, but it extends well beyond just cybersecurity benefits,” Dickinson says. “If it’s not already in your strategy, you need to be thinking about how you are going to do it and do it well.”

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Data performs a critical function within these industries, albeit one that has seen less digital transformation than other segments in recent years. Because of this, there is pressure on leaders to lunge for an AI project as a means to quickly manifest efficiencies in their operations.

“Data foundations must also be trusted, and solutions that act on that data must be trusted to do so correctly.”

However, whether organisations are curious, excited, motivated, or feeling like they’re under boardroom duress to deploy an AI solution into their asset management workflows, strategic considerations about how best to integrate these tools must come first.

Digital transformation is not a small undertaking, nor should it be about technology in and of itself, especially for companies managing critical infrastructure and assets potentially worth billions.

Hype Cycles, distractions and trust If you ask Scott McGowan, CEO of Australian asset management solutions firm COSOL, what he thinks of AI, he’ll tell you it represents a lot of potential in the asset management sector. However, he’ll also tell you not to run out and invest in an AI solution just because your board thinks you should.

“Data foundations must also be trusted, and solutions that act on that data must be trusted to do so correctly.”

Observing the proliferation of AI adoption hype across industry events, social media and the press, McGowan is concerned that market pressures might push organisations in asset-centric industries to try and run with AI before they can walk.

“Everyone expects everyone to build an AI division in-house, but if you’re a mining or infrastructure company, the reality is that’s not your core business,” he says. “Your core business is to produce iron, or coal, or copper, or to run trains and provide services to the public.”

Without reason or a roadmap, the discourse around AI integration often represents an unwelcome distraction from the primary mission of asset-centric industries.

Adoption pressures are being met with a degree of hesitation from business leaders, McGowan adds, due to the somewhat untested nature of AI in an asset management context and an absence of established trust.

“Hesitation toward AI probably comes from multiple aspects, but they all come back to one underlying principle, which is around trust,” he says. “Trust in security, trust in algorithms, and trust in data.”

“Trust is built on experience and understanding, and I think the challenge we have with AI as it stands today, is that the algorithms are designed in such a way that there’s little to no transparency as to the decision-making methodology those algorithms have.

“Data foundations must also be trusted, and solutions that act on that data must be trusted to do so correctly. Organisations need to trust that any solution they adopt is repeatable, robust and resilient.”

Exploring a path forward for AI in asset-centric industries will be the subject of a series of roundtables that COSOL, in partnership with IBM, will be running across three Australian cities in June. While the sessions are closed, select insights are set to be released highlighting discussions, pain points and strategies business leaders face.

Ahead of the events, COSOL’s McGowan touched on some of the issues set to be covered during the campaign.

First Steps: Learning to Walk with AI

AI transformation is a journey, not a big bang project. Organisations that approach their AI maturity through a lens of a walk-jog-run approach based on the true needs of the business are much more likely to find value in implementation versus those that seek shiny solutions.

In the first instance, the walk phase, McGowan urges that AI has to be solving an existing problem.

“There are a lot of AI initiatives and a lot of technologies looking for a problem; I think that’s the wrong way to go about it,” he says.

“The walk concept is solving a discrete problem that already lies within the technology space. If you think about self-solving and trust in data, using AI to resolve, infer, continually assess or optimise data quality is an interesting place to start.

“Through this approach AI starts to solve its own trust problem. The opportunity around master data quality and the ability to link physical equipment with digital representations for accuracy is in my view the first part of the AI journey.”

David Small, Principal Sales Leader for IBM Automation Software in Australia and New Zealand, echoes the need for organisational data layers to be updated and as accurate as possible to enable smarter asset management.

“Without quality data, organisations will struggle to achieve key benefits as they move along the asset maturity curve,” he says. “Data is the building block that asset management systems need.

“The direction that IBM has taken is to embed AI capability within the Maximo Application Suite vs saying to organisations go and build your own AI capability.

These AI enhancements are integrated AI experiences that deliver immediate value, increase productivity and seamlessly scale.”

Adding capability and building an AI-integrated business

Looking further into an AI modernisation program, companies might look to select an AI partner to help them further investigate ways and means AI can be implemented, be it in a proof of concept, or solving discrete problems.

Partnering with someone who specialises in AI can help companies build capability within the business from a cross-functional perspective.

“This phase is around automation of things like low-value tasks, work order administration, and master data creation as examples,” McGowan says.

“AI tools can bring forward understanding how to take a piece of equipment and represent it digitally and accurately.”

These types of initiatives should not be about solving technology problems but enhancing the operational capability of the business.

Of course, McGowan notes that strategy will need to be changed to enable technology to solve business problems. This may mean redefining the operating model and job descriptions around the purpose of AI.

“I can almost see a place where you define a job description for the AI agent or component, and it performs that task, has regular performance reviews, learns from its mistakes, and is managed like anyone else in a business,” he says.

Playing the long game

The warning to ‘innovate or be left behind’ is regularly bandied around with new technologies.

While McGowan notes the AI opportunity in asset management represents considerable potential, he feels strongly that it must be driven by practical business needs, organisational fit and readiness, rather than hype.

“The potential for AI particularly in the asset management space is almost endless, because largely the sector has not gone through as many digital revolutions that other industries and sectors have gone through,” he says.

“There are opportunities to do things like provide real-time feedback around avoiding potential incidents, or automating non-value-adding tasks.

“But it’s important that when we talk about driving efficiency with AI that we evolve our thinking in terms of what it means for careers and jobs and tasks and working to make those AI-infused rather than AI-replaced.

“We need to look at evolving the operating model to support the introduction of efficiency gains from AI and then driving your valued labour to much higher value tasks.”

This messaging will be central in COSOL’s upcoming roundtable series in Australia over the coming weeks.

With asset management leaders coming together to discuss the pivotal role of AI in shaping the future, valuable insights are guaranteed to emerge.

Many of these insights will be shared in an upcoming report. To register to receive these learnings, click this link.

The post Don’t run before you can walk with AI appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the dominant theme in business technology, with every tech vendor on the planet hyping new features as AI-driven this or AI-empowered that. And until recently, the noise has been just that: Best ignored when it comes time to get out the cheque book.

Often, AI capabilities have simply been embellishments of typical IT capabilities such as process automation, data analytics, or integration tools.

“AI is the new IT” I’ve said before, while also thinking, like most, that I’d better keep across what’s going on here.

While buyers remain sceptical, AI is rapidly maturing as the large language models that support it grow in sophistication and reduce in cost.

As AI gets embedded into business software platforms, this sophistication is arriving in the hands of software users and piquing the interest of both execs and IT procurement teams.

The AI translated a list of ERP product parameters into full sales-ready descriptions ready to upload to the web store, saving days and days of work.

The explosion of generative AI tools has excited users with the potential for this new breed of technology and driven rapid uptake. It has also heightened expectations that, at least in the immediate time frame, are likely to be dashed.

But there’s no doubt the cycle is trending up the enlightenment slope as AI use cases become clearer, LLMs improve, and vendors move from experimentation to embedding AI tooling into their products.

There are strong use cases emerging for ‘agentic’ AI that add genuine value to call centre staff helping customers resolve complex issues (which is why we called them in the first place, right?). And to be clear, I’m not talking the dreaded chatbots here, although they too are being improved (to avoid the call in the first place).

In CRM and online retailing, AI is delivering real value in surfacing customer insights and augmenting data collection.

I recently heard a great example where AI transformed a painful process of loading thousands of new products to an e-commerce site. The AI translated a list of ERP product parameters into full sales-ready descriptions ready to upload to the web store, saving days and days of work. Copilot can deliver some real value it seems.

We’re also seeing product recommendations and x-sell/up-sell suggestions that are actually useful, using AI’s ability to understand the semantics of the customer journey.

While the benefits of AI in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is less obvious, AI’s ability to generate insights from data, particularly in forecasting likely or possible outcomes, is looking promising for predictive analytics.

The use of natural language in search queries or in problem statements is making it easier for users to engage naturally with systems, without technical skills or detailed knowledge of the data they are searching.

GenAI is valuable for accelerating tasks, especially in contextualising search results, and is delivering improved personal productivity, but not necessarily something that sits comfortably inside an ERP.

It has also become an asset for developers by enabling quick retrieval of relevant code blocks or open-source solutions to resolve integration mapping or complex logic, significantly enhancing dev team productivity.

It [AI] is starting to not only identify data gaps or outliers, it’s then prompting users with suggestions to resolve the issue, in some cases even asking if it should go ahead and fix it.

Despite the advancements in AI, many buyers remain pragmatic and even sceptical about its capabilities.

Believing AI magic will happen can be a distraction away from the hard work of automating or integrating processes, or from improving transactional data quality. Those things are the true enablers of digital success.

But again, AI is having an impact as vendors introduce anomaly detection, alerting users when transactions are outside of norms so they can be fixed at source thereby improving data quality.

It is starting to not only identify data gaps or outliers, it’s then prompting users with suggestions to resolve the issue, in some cases even asking if it should go ahead and fix it. The net result is better quality, where AI-driven analytics can then start to play their part.

But are these trends translating into requirements that buyers are taking to market?

From my experience, not yet. Buyers are very engaged with the possibilities of AI, but they may not know yet the specific AI features that they require. What they want to do is align with vendors that have a strong story around how AI will be incorporated into the product they are evaluating. Which explains the hype. But the story must be believable and in pragmatic terms that people can get their heads around.

In our recent work interviewing local ERP leaders as part of iStart’s 2025-26 ERP Buyer’s Guide, the use cases listed in the table below were the common threads, as an attempt to meet that measure.

I’d expect features such as these to appear more regularly in software buyer requirements lists as the market matures.

One thing is for certain, AI technology will continue to evolve and improve. As it does, its role in business technology will create tangible applications that drive genuine efficiency and innovation.

The AI news is all good for innovation and productivity, but I worry about only one thing: Who will end up paying for the massive investment that the sector is attracting? Watch this space.

EMERGING USE CASES FOR AI IN BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY

Source: iStart ERP Buyers Guide 2025-26, vendor interviews and related literature reviews

Hayden McCall is managing director of digital publisher iStart technology in business and owns Software Shortlist, a consulting business helping companies to buy better software. He has been involved with IT and the software industry for over 25 years.

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“Artificial intelligence is now ready for delivering value to businesses in serious customer facing applications and everyone should really be looking at what solutions are out there for their industry that they can deploy quickly,” McPherson tells iStart.

“It’s no longer just an experimental technology – something to be trying or looking at in the back room – it’s something we should be adopting and deploying now within our businesses.”

Stuff’s chief technology officer, McPherson will be talking at next week’s Digital First 2023 about the latest developments in AI and how they could change business and society.

“Companies can pick up these AI models, specifically trained for your industry, and apply them fairly quickly.”

“AI is going to have an impact on a wide range of industries, but there are concerns about its impact and, as we see at the moment, sometimes AI is just completely wrong – it’s certainly not at the stage where it’s always giving right answers.”

Deeper concerns also exist around the potential for bias and risks in terms of job displacement and the need for people to retrain, and the potential to exacerbate existing societal inequalities.

“One of the challenges is, knowing this ahead of time, how can we be more proactive and make sure we are being more inclusive with the technology right from the start?”

McPherson says while AI is being adopted in point solutions for specific industries, it’s often buried within an existing application or in data analytics.

“In enterprise AI there are a lot of very small point solutions or use cases where AI can be implemented but those may not actually have very big business impact. Often they’re more around data processing or maybe getting some sort of insight for the business that still has to be acted on by a human,” he says.

“I don’t think many people are using it for customer interaction or something that is customer facing yet.”

While customer service bots might be seen as a minor exception to that, he says the first step starts with looking across the business to identify manually intensive and repetitive processes, and then looking within your industry to see if there is an industry solution already developed and trained to solve the problem.

“At the moment, there is this base AI capability that has been developed internationally by some of the big companies like Google, OpenAI and AWS, and then companies are taking those capabilities and training the AI to industry-specific solutions. Companies like us are able to pick up these AI models that have been specifically trained for our industry and apply them fairly quickly.

“That’s why it is important to be across the trends and AI solutions coming out and look within your industry to see what’s been developed. It’s the quickest way of finding something that can deliver value,” he says.

De-risking the process also requires extended trials.

“If you’re looking at AI that will have a major impact on customer experience, or is customer facing, it really needs to be run in parallel with existing processes for an extended time to ensure you’ve tried and tested all the scenarios and understand how it will behave. First to de-risk the process, but also so you really understand what the AI is capable of and how it delivers maximum value and how you need to change your processes.”

He cautions that companies implementing AI should also be prepared to accept AI and automated processes will not necessarily deliver what a human-managed process will.

“You can’t assume the AI is going to do things exactly how you would do it manually. You have to expect a level of difference. It’s about understanding that difference and making changes until you are comfortable with the difference, rather than expecting it to be exactly the same,” he says.

“AI is really about looking at the efficiencies it can create within the business, whether that is speeding up a process, particularly a manual process or potentially removing manual steps, especially repetitive manual steps that are time consuming.”

Getting an early, quick win, is another key aspect, McPherson says.

“Being able to adopt an AI solution you can see works and delivers value will certainly give you confidence to look further afield into other AI solutions and to invest more in AI going forward,” he says.

Upskilling of teams is also a crucial factor, he adds, and something that can’t be done in isolation.

“With everything online now it is much easier for people to upskill and for employers to upskill their teams. But the courses need to be taken within the context of then applying what is learned straight away, within the business in the context of a pilot implementation,” he says.

“We are looking to automate as much as we can across our business, and AI is just one type of advanced automation, and it enables a degree of automation that wasn’t really possible before.”

McPherson will be speaking at the Digital First 2023 event on 7 March 2023 in Auckland. See more, and book tickets, here.

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That’s according to Mitchell Pham, Director of CodeHQ, serial entrepreneur and strategic advisor, who says his experience as an advisor and board member has taught him that business executives can have very narrow bands of perspective built only around the work they have been doing.

“If you want to transform the business, you have to widen your horizon, broaden your awareness across a whole bunch of things that will impact your business the moment you go digital first,” he says. “And you have to take a very strategic approach and tap into a – hopefully diverse – board of directors, and also involve your customers, partners and suppliers in your journey.”

Pham, who chaired NZTech, FinTechNZ, Digital Council for Aotearoa and the ASEAN Business Alliance, and now co-chairs Kea Global, is a keynote speaker at next month’s Digital First conference in Auckland, where he will delve into the many areas CIOs need to be across to be truly ‘digital first’.

Those areas include emerging technologies, digital inclusion, trust, cybersecurity and ESG, but also extend into understanding the wider tech sector’s diversity and maturity, and government, business and regional trends.

“Horizontal awareness is key to inform your strategy and demonstrate that you are aware of the risks and the opportunities.”

“Transforming digitally isn’t just looking at how you change internally to become more efficient. It is much more strategic than that and involves a lot of external factors,” he says.

“There are a lot of things going on across the digital world that are really important for businesses to be aware of.”

Take, for example, digital inclusion. While governments are looking to ensure citizens aren’t left behind in the move to digital, for businesses it’s about ensuring none of the existing customer base is left behind.

The contentious area of digital trust is also crucial. Hard to earn, and very easy to lose, trust is a key lynchpin for business, but surveys show there are significant and growing numbers of consumers who don’t trust large public and private institutions..

So how can a company develop and maintain trust when they go digital?

“A key approach is to include the end customers or stakeholders in the journey. Whoever your technology impacts, whether they’re going to be using that technology to engage with the business or are going to be impacted by what the business does with digital technology, it’s important to include them in the entire process.”

That’s not just about getting their views and input to enable you to refine the offering, but also, crucially to ensure they feel they have been included and a sense of ownership.

“So you as a business are providing them with a new way of doing business with them, and actually they’ve had a say in it, they have some sense of ownership in how you are dealing with them now,” Pham says.

Transparency across all facets of a transaction or engagement and even how you govern the development of the technology used, is crucial for both earning and maintaining trust, he adds.

He also cautions Kiwi organisations to pull back on the DIY.

“When they take on digital transformation, New Zealand businesses tend to self-develop everything when in fact there are plenty of offerings already developed, proven and tested by companies that specialise in those areas and will be able to do it better than you can.

“If you need to transform your business and bring technology in to make it more efficient, that’s not new innovation, so look towards the tech industry to see what is already there.”

Even if you are developing technology that is truly new and unique in your industry, a partnering model will likely be more successful.

Pham says businesses often don’t think laterally enough when they approach going digital first and says models like ventures and collaborations enable organisations to partner to get to the end state faster and to scale more rapidly.

“If you are going to become a digital first business you have to make sure your governance structure supports that – that you have the right people onboard, and you have the support of the board and the executive team.

“This awareness of trends shapes your strategy. And then making sure you have the ability and skills and the right people to execute and know when to not DIY, when to partner.

“So governance, strategy, execution then becomes quite interlinked, and key enablers to either make or break your digital transformation or innovation journey.”

Pham says CIOs need to be asking themselves, and their organisations, the tough questions.

“It’s the CIOs, CDOs, CTOs who need to be asking the questions. They are the ones who can take all these things and educate the key stakeholders as to why the questions about governance, strategy and ability to execute are so important,” he says.

Pham says he’s seen brilliant executives stopped by boards who, while very capable, don’t have the right background to confidently make or back decisions on digital, so instead either don’t take any risks, or end up taking risks they don’t understand nor know how to manage.

IT executives, he says, can provide the reassurance and confidence for the board to move ahead with digital.

“Horizontal awareness is very, very key to inform your strategy and to demonstrate to stakeholders that you are aware of the risks and the opportunities.”

Pham will be speaking at the Digital First 2023 event on 7 March 2023 in Auckland. See more, and book tickets, here.

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“I used to be the bad attitude guy, downloading stuff and so on. I had to have a massive change in my mindset around the importance of cybersecurity,” Tangiora, head of digital transformation for Tainui Group Holdings, says.

That change came in 2017, when Tainui Group Holdings had its first audit focusing on cybersecurity controls.

“At the same time the Institute of Directors had started to talk about it a lot and I had just seen it on the landscape that our directors were asking more pointed questions around what we are doing.

“We need health and safety for data, and it’s not there”

“From that point on there was no way I was going to drop the ball with this, so over time I’ve forced myself to become good at this and made cybersecurity a big part of my daily activities,” he says.

Today, Tangiora, who will be speaking at the 2022 NZ Cyber Security Summit in February, believes cybersecurity should be viewed in the same way as health and safety for businesses and be just as visible to everyone within the business.

“Health and safety is really big at the moment. That’s the attitude change we need around data. We have to do things in a similar way and have a sense of urgency around having strategies and plans.

“We need health and safety for data, and it’s not there,” he says.

“The information I get from our vendors is that New Zealand is immature in its approach to cybersecurity and we need to be more realistic and also more thoughtful about it.”

That includes IT teams moving front and centre with the cybersecurity message.

“Leadership and influence are the first part to developing a cybersecurity strategy for business agility and resilience,” he says.

“You’ve got to be a better leader, have the uncomfortable conversations and lead from the front, because who is going to be a champion of data if you’re not?”

For Tangiora, that means ensuring that cybersecurity is front of mind not just for his board and executive teams, but for the wider business.

Just as the organisation puts out health and safety messages every week, so Tangiora has mirrored that with cybersecurity.

“It’s important to be out in front of people, ensuring everyone knows it is really important to us and that everyone has a role to play and needs to understand their role as a digital kaitiaki. You are a digital guardian of our information for our organisation.”

He’s proud of the fact that some of Tainui’s users who are in their 70s are now well versed in detecting phishing emails, and know what to do.

“Cybersecurity is around protecting the most vulnerable and critical assets. It’s around understanding our digital life.”

But he says, often users have poor cybersecurity practices in their private lives – poor password management or a lack of backups.

“People come from home into the corporate environment, and we can’t even validate that they know what safe looks like. Someone turns up at your workplace on the first day and we just assume they know how to use systems safely. Do they really? Do they know what safe looks like?”

Tangiora’s journey has seen him working to understand people, processes and technology, and implementing strong, robust frameworks, such as the NIST cybersecurity framework, while connecting with thought leaders from global providers to the National Cybersecurity Centre and NZ Cert, to ensure he’s across changes in real time.

“It’s about the controls you put in place to protect your environment and data and understanding what your real risk is and making sure you have the right level of control for the level of risk facing that particular piece of data or application.”

He admits it’s hard work, with cybersecurity now accounting for up to 30 percent of his daily workload.

“Cybersecurity is a business priority.

“If someone has a fall at work that’s not going to take the business down. But one slip or fall in cybersecurity and the whole business could go away. We know the stakes.”

And he’s open that there aren’t any shortcuts. But it’s also not rocket science.

“There’s a method to do cybersecurity well and it’s well known,” he says, noting that current advice is largely directing organisations to zero trust with some security automation and AI, along with having strong policies.

“There is no magic pill. It’s just hard work and sticking to the basics.”

When it comes to breaching an environment there are two ways – hacking people and hacking technology.

“Hacking technology means you have a vulnerability or an unknown exploit that you haven’t patched yet. That’s one way in.

“If you haven’t got a policy that tells you how to update your computers and how to maintain them and update all your infrastructure, or you don’t know what your assets are, you can’t patch them. You don’t know where they all are.

“So the basic take away there is understand your IT environment, understand what is important and keep a record of it. Know the basics. Those are 101s and everyone will tell you those.

“All your policies and procedures, are they any good, can you read them, can anyone pick them up and understand the language of what to do and why it is important? And how it fits into the context of the rest of the business.

“It’s about leadership and doing the basics well.”

Hear more from Tangiora and other security practitioners at the 2022 NZ Cyber Security Summit which returns to Wellington – and online – February 15-16. Super saver pricing is available until 17 December.

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“Actually, getting the work done, or even knowing where to start in defining your transformation journey is a lot of work,” Desai says.

The chief digital and innovation officer for The Real Estate Institute of New Zealand (REINZ), whose previous roles include head of business transformation for Paymark and digital sales performance director at Westpac, Desai is well versed in transformation.

She’s led REINZ ‘on quite a journey in terms of defining their transformation’.

It’s a journey that the entire REINZ business has been on – with the customer at the heart of the transformation – as a membership organisation, members are ‘our number one priority’, Desai notes.

For REINZ the transformation started with understanding the customer journey including an audit of what was being offered, the pain points and then looking to understand exactly what the customers – in their varying forms – needed from the organisation today and in the future.

“The first thing they think is ‘I’m going to lose my job’”

“We wanted to define the experience customers wished they could have with us – and not just what that experience looks like, but what it felt like when you got there. Getting people to describe a feeling helps you understand what it needs to feel like when we deliver that experience,” Desai, who will be speaking at the upcoming CIO Summit, says.

“The feeling bit is what gets people resonating with your brand.”

REINZ also did an audit of its technology and architecture so it understood fully not just what it had, but what was needed to support the experience customers’ said they wanted.

“We looked at what technology we needed to support the customer  experience, what it needed to look like and developed the roadmap of how we would get there. What are the areas that are the biggest risk? What are the things that you need to do first versus the things you can do later on?”

Alongside all that, the Institute was looking at its own evolution, with a widespread commercialisation strategy to help it understand the wider market segments, where it had the skills and experiences to deliver a unique experience and where it wanted to focus its efforts for both existing and new customers.

“That helped us with a growth strategy and starting to think about diversifying the business slightly, so you are evolving as the market and customer needs evolve.”

For REINZ, the transformation strategy has translated to more structured growth, a move into the data analytics space, and a series of new products, including an automated valuation model, using advanced robotics to constantly analyse house prices across New Zealand to provide estimates of values for real estate agents and the internal team.

The REINZ DataHub is a central hub for accessing and understanding REINZ property data. REINZ has invested in a Datamart, pulling all REINZ’s data into one platform that allows APIs and web services.

“There was a bit of organic growth before I got here. Now it is definitely more structured growth and everything is happening in a targeted way,” Desai says.

“Data driven analytics is really where the business is evolving and I think most businesses are going in the same direction,” she says.

“But what that means is that we have thought about our infrastructure in a different way, around what are the foundational things you need, what enables the customer experience and therefore what are the products and services that you can then offer?”

The transformation programme is structured so that any changes or new systems need to fall into the areas of innovation, enablement or foundation.

When it comes to driving a high-performance culture – a critical component in leading a genuine technology transformation – Desai offers up three key tips:

1. Empower your people, allow them to make mistakes and learn from them. “Sometimes a mistake can actually lead to a new opportunity too,” she notes.
2. Ensure upfront, clear open conversation and allow people to challenge each other’s thinking in respectful ways. “That helps create a culture of people asking questions, which is not a bad thing, and that way, everyone is starting to think a little differently – which is what you want.”
3. Provide strategic direction, but not the how. “It’s important to be very clear about what the outcome needs to be, but your team should develop the how and come up with the ideas because if you tell them every step to take, you don’t get any different (and better) ways of thinking.”

Oh, and one other thing: Tackle the elephant in the room upfront.

“Saying to people we are going to do a digital transformation means nothing. People think digital probably means automation of some sort, and the first thing they think is ‘I’m going to lose my job’.

“The elephant in the room should be addressed versus ignoring it, which just creates more uncertainty.

“And actually, in most organisations where you go through a true transformation of the digital sort, you actually start with your people, your customers. They are at the heart of your change which is around improving the processes for your people so that you can service your customer faster. It’s not that we fancy putting in some new technology.”

The 2021 CIO Summit will be held in Auckland and virtually, August 31-September 01. Register here.

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It’s no small aspiration. But for Simon Kennedy, Foodstuffs North Island’s chief digital officer, it’s a key pillar not just in helping drive his 280 strong internal IT team and informing their work, but in ensuring a powerful, cross-functional collaborative approach to technology across the business.

“It’s a key pillar in starting to see things through the same lens and then when you get into more detail around what the technology might be you are linking it back to a common frame of reference for everyone,” Kennedy says.

“We will always be able to think up more opportunities than we have capacity to execute.”

Kennedy is responsible for all of the team looking after all of the technology – both enterprise systems and customer facing offerings – across Foodstuffs North Island’s three retail banners of PAK’nSAVE, New World and Four Square, as well as the Gilmours wholesale operation.

It’s a role he relishes, saying he enjoys the breadth, and that to some extent the completeness of the role makes it easier.

“There is no doubt as to where responsibilities and accountabilities lie. It’s pretty much if you plug it in or a customer touches it and its technology, then it’s in my world and we look after it.”

While the aspiration of being one of the most customer-driven organisations might be the big driver, Kennedy has four key outcomes his team aspires to: Having a good digital and physical experience for customers; being a data powered organisation; automating and optimising for cost; and being a world class technology team.

It’s the area of being a data powered organisation which Kennedy believes has seen the most progress in terms of the whole business understanding the concept and working together around it.

In fact, he says for most in the business the largest data programme – the Acting on Customer Insights programme – isn’t even viewed as a technology offering.

“We have a business-wide programme around that customer-driven strategy and a big part of that is how we can do more to act on customer insight to really understand what customers are telling us and then drive that understanding and insight back into our operational decisions so the best possible proposition shows up for our customers.

“Data is an absolute, almost a foundation element of it, but it is a business programme that everyone across the organisation is involved in. It just happens to have a lot of technology enablement in it.

“You talk to people around the organisation and they wouldn’t think ‘that’s a systems programme we’re doing’. It’s a business programme and it is about customers, but it is using data to power those insights.”

Pushing the leading edge
For Foodstuffs North Island, there are data points aplenty, with 315 stores in the co-operative, and reams of products, customers and transactions. The Acting on Customer Insights programme has seen the business design and create a single customer view, with data anonymised where needed, harnessing that data, enriching and processing it and running it through the tools to get rich insights to enable those who are making decisions.

The retailer works with Dunnhumby, a global customer data science company, whose set of tools effectively bring some data science to bear on Foodstuffs North Island’s operational and customer data.

But those tools are only as powerful as the quality and completeness of the data driven into them, and Kennedy and his team have put in the work to identify, organise and set up the ongoing data feeds into Dunnhumby’s tools. It’s work he says is having ‘an absolute direct benefit into the insights and other outcomes we can get back out of those tools’.

For customers, it means increasingly relevant offers, product ranges targeted to each store’s customer base, and customised store layouts. While Foodstuffs’ cooperative structure, with local store owners, brings local knowledge and entrepreneurial flair in each store and community connection, the customer insights programme enables the company to back that with data science.

The Dunnhumby tools employ AI and machine learning, technologies Kennedy sees as being increasingly important for enhancing customer experiences and managing the customer journey. The company is also harnessing machine learning in its transport optimisation offerings and has AI in use working through verbatim customer comments in surveys and extracting key narratives.

“As we work through those kind of data-powered programmes it’s driving a general increase in and understanding of quality and power of data. When you have got that source data that improves the business case for bringing in the AI type technologies,” Kennedy says.

“We’re still almost in the foothills of that whole journey. But AI and ML’s role is pretty broad because it is well suited to the environment where there are large amounts of data and a dynamic decision landscape.”

Also in early work is robotics process automation. Just two years into its RPA work, using UiPath, Foodstuffs North Island has just clicked passed 26,000 hours of annual time saved.

Work so far has been largely in the financial and administrative space with the likes of invoice processing and credit handling, but Kennedy sees a much bigger future for the bots.

“There is a lot more to come there. In some ways we are just beginning.”

Foodstuffs RPA capability sits within the digital workplace team where Kennedy believes there’s a ‘reasonably neat adjacency’ between the likes of Microsoft Teams, Flow and the skills and outlook needed around RPA.

Also falling within the automate and optimise for cost programme is a major supply chain project, deploying a new technology suite – both a warehouse management system and a transport management system – based on Blue Yonder.

New software was implemented into each of the company’s distribution centres but the big project was the building of a new distribution centre in Auckland, complete with the underlying infrastructure, network, WiFi, security and management platforms for devices.

It’s a project Kennedy is proud of, even if it’s one that passed under the radar for many.

“There was a lot of extremely high-quality effort behind the scenes, but it’s one of those technology achievements where if no one notices it’s been a fantastic effort because there was no disruption.”

He’s also proud of the way Foodstuffs North Island’s systems coped with the massive surges, variability and supply chain disruptions brought about by Covid last year.

“We had to do some stuff for sure, but from a front-end point of view pretty much it did what it was supposed to do in automatically scaling out in using those cloud architectures, and the back-end remained robust.

Foodstuffs North Island’s retail ecommerce is on Sitecore’s platform, with Salesforce used in wholesale. (Salesforce is also used for the service centre, while the company’s core is SAP, which provides the ERP backbone including inventory, ordering, finance and reporting, as well as the HRIS.)

Helping the supply chain and merchandising teams manage both the extreme volumes and unpredictability of Covid was where the SAP backbone, combined with the investment in the Blue Yonder warehouse and transport management systems, came to the fore.

“I think credit to my team, because that stuff doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because there has been investment and care and good processes and maintenance.”

Less dramatic, but critical to the ongoing customer experience, is the continuous improvement journey Foodstuffs North Island is taking to ‘join up’ its digital and physical experiences.

The company has a digital strategy for each brand which sees it releasing features, sprint by sprint, into the web and app offerings, increasingly integrating the physical and digital experiences with things such as the ability to capture and manage lists and helping customers find things in store or check products.

On the wholesale side, a simple move to digitise Gilmours previously somewhat cumbersome sign-up process for the cash and carry business, has proved a win-win for customers and business. The digitisation of the process has provided a much faster, easier experience for customers, enabling them to get shopping faster, while significantly reducing the number of calls to customer service around Gilmours signups.

Future forward
As to the future, Kennedy says Foodstuffs like most vendors is faced with the challenge of where to invest its time, focus and effort. Which brings us neatly back to the company’s aspiration to become one of the most customer driven organisations.

“We will always be able to think up and ideate and create more opportunities for how we are going to move there than we are going to have capacity to execute, so how do we work well across our leadership, across our business as a whole to make those right decisions of choosing the right number of things to go after, neither too few or too many, with the right resource at the right pace?

“If you are using those customer promises as the key lens through which to choose where you are going to focus on, what your priorities are going to be and where you are going to put your effort then everything should line up across the business.”

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It’s a saying Bob Parker, IDC senior vice president, enterprise applications, data intelligence, services and industry research, calls on for his advice to companies about digital resilience: You have to know your roadmap, trust the technology and have the courage to make the investment.

It is, he says, key to building digital resilience, defined by Parker as the ability for an organisation to rapidly adapt to business disruptions by leveraging digital capabilities to not only restore business operations but also capitalise on the changed conditions.

It’s also something many Kiwi companies are apparently lacking in.

A worldwide digital resiliency benchmarking exercise by IDC saw New Zealand ranked fourth of all Asia Pacific countries – behind Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. But New Zealand’s rating of 18.0, on a scale of up to 30 put us behind the worldwide average of 20.1.

“Know the horse, trust the course and have the courage to make the jump.”

Asia Pacific on the whole tracked poorly, with an average of just 14.6, despite emerging from the pandemic ahead of much of the rest of the world, Parker, who will be a keynote speaker at the 2021 CIO Summit in August, notes.

“In some cases people were agile, which means they could adapt to changing circumstances, but they didn’t always maintain their central purpose,” he says.

“A sign of not being digitally resilient was if the actions you took were just to weather the storm, whereas in other situations where you did have the digital capabilities you were able to take market share from those less digitally resilient, you were able to maintain profitability, you were able to pivot for customers, whether it’s direct home delivery or kerbside or in healthcare telemedicine.

“The NZ performance from an infectious disease control view was very good, but I don’t think the businesses were as digitally invested as what we saw in other countries and other regions.”

He speculates that could be down in part to New Zealand being a ‘self-contained organism to a large extent’ and the predominance of smaller businesses who don’t have the capacity, skills or resources to invest in emerging technology that accelerates digital resiliency.capacity to invest in technology.

“What we have seen time and time again in the past year is that those organisations who had a foundation of investments in digital transformation were able to adapt quicker and accelerate their business activities,” he says.

Digitally resilient companies in Asia Pacific reported more than 50 percent greater improvements in profitability, innovation, cost savings, revenues, customer satisfaction and employee productivity.

So what do companies need to do to become digitally mature and therefore digitally resilient?

“There are three things that correlate,” Parker says.

“One is to have a long term plan. What we saw during the pandemic was those companies that did have long term plans accelerated them as a result of the pandemic.

“The second is to focus on specific use cases in a coordinated way over that planning period, say three years.

“And then the third is to have a technology platform that allows you to move quickly to either take advantage of a favourable position or to mitigate a risk.”

When it comes to coordinated use cases, Parker says it’s important to understand high value use cases can’t be done in isolation. Companies must understand how they impact each other, and then prioritise them over time horizons, since you can’t do everything at once.

As to the technologies companies are leaning on heavily to develop digital resiliency, Parker points to cloud, hybrid work technologies and digital transformation investments such as artificial intelligence, IoT and automation technologies, and of course, security.

Parker also warns that digital resilience is a constantly shifting battlefield. Once we’re out the other side of the pandemic, there will still be challenges for businesses to adjust to and capitalise on.

“We know this will not be the last crisis an organisation faces. The digital economy will create more cycles of disruption to business operations and business models than in any other economic period.”

Leading the way, Parker believes, will be the changing and increasingly complex customer demands.

“It will be one of the great challenges going forward for businesses.

“People more and more want to own things less – they want to own the experience and that’s a much different business model, a much different way of thinking so I think that is going to be a critical success factor for businesses moving forward,” he says.

“There is a real business advantage to being digitally mature, it’s not just a hypothesis, it’s proven in the data,” Parker says. “So if I can leave everyone with one message it would be: You need to have a plan but you need to execute quickly and you need to have your technology ducks in a row if you are going to be effective.”

Backing the right horse also helps.

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The post Becoming a digitally resilient enterprise appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

“People have to be pretty careful in terms of their hand wringing over this,” says the founding owner and managing director of Kiwi custom software developer Sandfield, whose clients include Mainfreight. “Big employers and people who use a lot of contractors really need to ask what they are doing in terms of contributing towards solving this problem.”

The NZTech Digital Skills for our Digital Future report, released early this year, laid bare the lack of investment in in-house development with just 10 percent of corporate training budgets spent on digital tech upskilling. Combined with a tendency to look offshore for talent – a door now largely slammed shut thanks to Covid and New Zealand border restrictions – flatlining enrolments in tertiary IT education and a lack of interest from younger students in technology and pathway subjects, it has created a perfect storm not just for the tech sector but for all businesses relying on technology.

“What are you doing to grow talent?”

IT Professionals New Zealand CEO Paul Matthews is a lead for the skills section of the Digital Industry Transformation Plan. “As an industry we are doing a really poor job of developing domestic talent compared to other professions or vocations,” he says. “The need for such a high level of immigration is essentially a symptom of that.”

NZTech CEO Graeme Muller agrees, noting the ‘very low investment’ by Kiwi technology firms, corporates and government agencies on upskilling.

“It is not that there are a lack of places for people to learn, it is a lack of desire for companies to invest in their current staff and, historically, if they needed someone with digital skills they would just go and employ them,” he told iStart.

That’s a key bugbear for Copeland, who says companies resourcing projects with contractors and not including graduates and new people into the mix are ‘making the problem worse’.

“They are taking people who are experienced and could be mentoring and just sweeping them up and putting them into these projects.”

Sandfield has a robust internship and graduate programme with a high proportion of its team starting as interns and then joining full-time as graduates. The company, which has a staff of 120, has taken on about 10 grads in the past year.

Internships are fundamental for the industry, Matthews says, but the numbers are ‘scary’. Last year the Summer of Tech programme had more than 1,000 students wanting to take up internships. Just 200-250 companies were prepared to provide them.

The draft skills plan, which will be part of the overall Digital ITP, will go out for consultation by the end of June and internships are among the ‘quick wins’ Matthews is hoping will drive success.

“The reality is we simply need more of them. We have a model that works with Summer in Tech, but we need to scale it up.”

He says some key issues, such as the cost and the time and focus involved in bringing interns in, can be readily addressed.

Copeland acknowledges there is a cost – for Sandfield, which bills on hours, it’s largely the time cost. But he says: “We’re not doing it purely out of the goodness of our heart.

“What we find is that they are quick and anxious to learn, they fit in with our culture and start contributing to the general feeling and vibe in the office.

“It’s been pretty successful for us and we really like the result.”

That quickness to learn is a key feature of graduates says Giovanni Russello, head of the School of Computer Science at Auckland University. He’s frustrated by companies expecting grads to be immediately work ready.

“We create people who are able to learn quickly and adapt. They have that on top of the general technical aspects of a degree in computer science. But they need experience in the field,” he says.

Matthews agrees. “No other profession would expect someone straight out of university to be productive on day one. “If you study architecture you come out as a graduate into an architecture firm and they expect that it will take a year or two to finish your learning essentially in an industry setting.

“In other professions the education and the training piece is something that is shared a bit more between industry and tertiary, whereas here we look to the tertiary sector and say their grads are no good because we can’t put them to work on day one.”

Both Matthews and Russello are keen to see closer industry-academia links.

“We are the subject matter experts but they are the education experts,” Matthews says. “But whether education has to happen in that traditional setting is another matter and that’s where things like workplace learning, apprenticeship degrees and those sorts of things come in.

“The traditional model of doing a degree programme within a classroom is going to work for some people  but it’s not going to be really where the big future is sitting.”

New pathways
The skills draft contains a raft of options for new training options and pathways into tech, including earn while you learn, apprenticeships and apprenticeship degrees, which combine a degree’s theoretical component with on-the-job training which increases as each year of training goes by.

Apprenticeships have previously been for lower levels of the New Zealand qualifications framework, below degrees and diplomas, but Rove (Review Of Vocation Education) has thrown the old model up in the air and presented an opportunity for apprenticeships at the higher, more complex levels required by the tech sector.

The NZ Tech report early this year showed there wasn’t so much a skills shortage in New Zealand as a skills mismatch, making reskilling equally important.

“Generally it is the more specialist roles that are in higher demand that we can’t fill,” Matthews notes. “And we have got a lot of people mid-career who are working through but aren’t growing as fast as they would be if they were in a parallel profession.”

Cross skilling them to move into more in-demand areas, and bringing into the sector people from ‘compatible’ backgrounds via programmes like the defunct ICT grad schools (funding ran out fo them last year) is a key option, Matthews says.

“What we have found is there are a number of small, good activities happening in this space but no real coordinated approach and certainly no significant focus at a national level and that’s probably an area we need the most attention in,” he says.

The University of Auckland is one organisation offering an ICT Grad School – catering to around 100 people each year and including a 10-week internship – short courses and micro-credentials to assist with upskilling and cross skilling in areas such as cybersecurity forensics and cloud computing. Data science and machine learning/AI plans are also afoot and the university is also offering targeted training to groups of up to 10 people offering crash courses in technology subjects targeted to the industry requesting the training.

Russello says Covid has seen the university to accelerate some initiatives to align more closely with industry, including short courses and micro-credentials.

He’s also pushing for closer ties with industry, including having industry fronting as guest lecturers, or talking directly to students to tell them about the opportunities available at their businesses and what the students need to do to take advantage of the opportunities.

He points to the Netherlands, where he was a PhD student at Eindhoven University of Technology and where there is strong integration between the university and a range of companies including Phillips and 3D printing company Shapeways.

“We have these strong links that create an infrastructure between the university and the industry that they have around the city. And unfortunately I don’t see anything of that sort here in NZ.”

He’s trying to set up similar in Auckland.

“Having the two worlds of academia and industry meeting in a more consistent and meaningful way would be a very good step – having industry people teaching into our lectures, having a more active role supervising graduate students, PhDs and running programmes which can be directly linked to what they’re doing in their business, rather than being theoretical or academic projects.”

That’s something Phillips harnessed in Eindhoven to drive their innovation, he says, but it’s something surprisingly few businesses – even some of New Zealand’s biggest tech names – are involved in, he says.

Combined with academia putting resource into upskilling type courses and programmes focused on industry – something that again he notes can’t happen in a vacuum and would require industry input – would provide positive movement on the talent issues, he says.

Many of Russello’s students are snapped up by big name companies internationally, including Apple and Google.

“I think that is something for the local industry to think about – like salary spend and what kind of business they are, how nice it is working for them, how interesting.”

Copeland is in agreement. His company works hard to attract grads and retain its team long term.

So what role does business have to play in all this?

Matthews says it’s time for companies to look beyond their immediate needs and consider mid- and long-term talent requirements.

While immigration will always be part of the solution, filling more than 50 percent of roles via immigration is unsustainable.

He expects a five to 10 year process to move investment and focus into domestic tech development, and a rebalancing which will ultimately see a more sustainable 20-25 percent of roles filled via immigration.

“Businesses as a whole must be thinking about how they can develop their own talent to meet their needs rather than just expecting to buy them in when the time comes,” he says.

Copeland is more direct: “The whole country has to try harder to get more people into work and more people into higher paying sectors.”

The post Tech talent shortage: The training equation appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

It’s indicative of the growing concern from companies around the difficulties of getting critical technology staff – a shortage that Graeme Muller, NZTech CEO, says is holding back New Zealand’s economy, slowing the digitalisation of businesses and slowing growth for digital exporters.

“When we talk to Immigration they say use the ‘other critical workers pathway’ and that there should be no issues getting tech people in because they are on the skills shortage list,” Muller says. “Yet we are constantly hearing people say they can’t get people to fill roles in New Zealand and they keep getting knocked back by Immigration NZ and can’t get people in.

The government is trying to create a digital boost but they have turned off the tap of the people who are actually going to provide the service.

“The government is spending $15 million trying to create a digital boost, trying to increase the digital uptake of companies but they have turned off the tap of the people who are actually going to provide the service,” Muller told iStart.

Border restrictions put in place last March mean the only way technology workers can come to New Zealand is under a critical worker exemption. There are specialist exemptions available – critical healthcare workers for example (interestingly that includes bringing in physiotherapists – a valued role certainly, but critical for New Zealand?). There’s no such category for tech workers, leaving IT in the catchall category of ‘other critical workers’ – a category where the exemption is, in the words of Paul Janssen, senior consultant at immigration services provider IMMagine Australia and New Zealand, ‘really, really high’. Short of finding a worker internationally who just happens to be married to a Kiwi or an NZ citizen, it’s your only option currently.

And that ‘really, really high’ threshold comes with a stinger. Janssen notes a change in phrasing to a requirement that the skills are ‘not readily attainable’ – something very different from a role being in shortage.

“It essentially means those skills – not necessarily those people – can’t be attainable in New Zealand,” he says. “It doesn’t necessarily matter if you have tried to find someone and there is an apparent shortage of skills, the skills can’t be ‘readily attainable’. Which makes a very, very high bar.”

It’s a bar that also suggests our government is advocating head hunting local staff from other businesses – something Janssen notes doesn’t solve any problems, merely transferring them to someone else.

Even the musical chairs that has been the tech job market recently appears to be slowing down.

“People have been moving around jobs but even that has stopped because you don’t move three months after you’ve just moved,” Muller says.

Janssen says some IT professionals are getting through the border, including cybersecurity experts – perhaps understandable given Waikato DHB’s recent tangle with that issue.

“It’s not a wholesale thing.

“But if you’re looking for a good developer, programmer, network engineer, where we know that the local market can’t readily supply those, we know that your chance of getting a border exemption is pretty limited.”

Janssen also questions whether Immigration NZ itself has clear enough criteria.

“They’re working off a set of words that can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. What’s ‘not readily attainable’ to them is very different to what is not readily attainable to you and I or to a business that is struggling to grow or deliver on projects because it doesn’t have the staff.”

While Muller hadn’t had a chance to read through the survey responses when he spoke with iStart, he says his gut feeling, based on plenty of discussion with those attempting to bring tech staff into New Zealand, is that there’s another issue at play.

“There is a mismatch between the understanding at immigration of what is needed by the industry, versus the lists or rules they are working off.

“It’s only a guess at this point, but I think the types and names of roles and the role descriptions don’t align with what immigration understands are scarce roles.”

Many of the roles companies are requiring don’t fall into existing Anzsco (Australia and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations) listings.

“The shortage is experience in areas which will take a long time to develop in New Zealand. It’s either very advanced technology like data science or machine learning or complicated roles which don’t have a traditional role description.

“You might call it a product manager or something like that in a SaaS exporter, but it will be someone who is looking at product market fit and the design and development of the product not just the coding of it,” Muller says.

“The roles that are critical for companies don’t fit the normal box. It’s roles with strange titles, like user design interface, things like that where Immigration might go ‘oh, that sounds like something marketing could do, so no you don’t need an exemption’. But for a SaaS company trying to penetrate a new market, it’s a critical role.”

Janssen agrees, noting that Immigration is based on Anzsco but the statistical industry and job reference tool is old and hasn’t progressed with change.

“So you’ve got a system that is out of step with how fast the tech sector in particular moves.”

He also points to a lack of training for Immigration officers for what is a complex, challenging job assessing roles across all industries.

Immigration New Zealand declined to answer specific questions on the issue, or indeed to provide any comment about how companies could better manage applications to avoid what appears to be a high number of applications being declined. (It also declined to give any figures around the number of applications being accepted or declined.)

Instead the government agency provided a generic comment stating: “New Zealand’s border restrictions mean that there are limited people who can currently come into the country. Immigration New Zealand’s role as a regulator is to assess people’s eligibility to be granted a border restriction in line with the relevant criteria as decided by Government and set out in policy.”

A follow-up email did, however, note that occupations don’t have to be on a skill shortage list for an employer to hire a migrant worker.

“If an employer can prove there are no suitable New Zealanders available to fill the role, they can hire someone on a temporary work visa. If an occupation is included on a skill shortage list, it just means employers can hire temporary visa holders without needing to look to the domestic workforce first.”

Janssen says that might be correct – under ordinary circumstances, but doesn’t hold true for the current situation.

“The border exemption requirements are far, far higher than what they are listing there. Even being on a shortage list – and we do have several of them and IT professionals do tend to be on those shortage lists, but that in itself at the moment is not enough.

“If you were on the long-term skills shortage list that would not be enough to get a border exemption because that threshold is lower than the threshold they apply.”

Janssen has another key concern: The apparent lack of future planning by the government.

“These border exemptions are very short-term thinking and a means to protect New Zealand – that’s the standard line. But we’re struggling here because we need a longer-term view, a longer-term plan.

“It very much feels like Immigration and the Minister are plugging holes as he goes, keeping different groups quiet in order to just keep the media at bay, without having much of a plan.

“The biggest gap is the lack of a longer-term plan. And we’ve had time to do that.”

Beyond the border
Border closures might be an easy scapegoat, but the spotlight is also falling on other areas. Some suggest businesses are attempting to drive the wage costs down by bringing in cheap labour rather than investing in finding more senior experienced staff in offshore markets.

It’s an argument both Muller and Janssen say doesn’t stand up in their eyes.

“From our research that’s completely incorrect,” Muller says. “There is no downward movement. There’s no discounting on salaries of those coming into the market and there isn’t a pool of talent sitting around because they’re expecting to get more.”

“It is just a genuine global market shortage of these skills and most education systems, not just the NZ education system, have struggled to adapt fast enough to attract people into these new pathways and create new pathways that are more aligned with the jobs of now.

There’s plenty of work being done on the training front, including with the Digital Industry Transformation Plan – but that’s another story.

And New Zealand tech wages are continuing to trend up. NZTech data shows three years ago the median income for a digital worker was $82,000. By 2019 it was $92,250, a figure Muller believes has since increased to over $100,000. (If you’re bringing someone in on the critical worker exemption, there’s a requirement of $106,000, with that figure set to rise to $112,000 come July.)

David Leach, CEO at Kiwi inventory management and PoS system provider Cin7, says almost every appointment his company is currently making is now over budget and over the top of the salary banding Cin7 has in place for the roles.

The company is currently hiring for 15 roles in New Zealand. That’s a pretty stock standard hiring rate for the company, which has been growing rapidly, both in New Zealand and globally.

While previously Cin7 has hired around 10-15 percent of its NZ based staff from global markets, it stopped that when the border closed. Instead, it’s focusing on local hires. But it’s a struggle.

“It’s a lot harder to find people. It takes a lot longer and almost every appointment is over budget. It’s harder and slower to hire because there is a talent shortage. We’re seeing top candidates with four or five options on the table, which makes it hard to be the winner.”

The company is finding similar talent shortages in Denver, it’s US base. In India, where it has around 50 staff, there isn’t the talent shortage, but there is a lot of GDP growth resulting in rising salary expectations.

Software architect Nico de Wet, in a LinkedIn comment in response to the NZTech survey, says he also ‘disagrees wholeheartedly’ on the shortage of talent front.

“There is rather a shortage of good, suitably qualified and experienced management willing to recruit and train locally.”

Certainly, New Zealand does have a dismal record when it comes to investing in staff training.

NZTech’s Digital Skills for Our Digital Future report found companies spend less than 10 percent on upskilling. At the same time the numbers of students studying technology standards is down, as are the numbers enrolling in tertiary IT courses – dropping two percent per annum, and six percent per annum at an IT degree level.

We’ve long relied on migrant labour. To put things in perspective, for the last five years New Zealand has created 4,000-5,000 new jobs a year. And we’ve imported 83-85 percent of those roles in the last three years.

Another person responding on LinkedIn to the NZTech survey, Harrison Grierson head of digital delivery Edwin Ashdown, commented “There is a highly in demand technology skillset mobility debt that NZ organisations are building up, it is not a bubble, it is just economics.

“Technological skills create a hierarchy of demand, and this debt can only be repaid by the highest bidding companies that want great talent.

“We have talent, let the market set demand and supply will follow.”

Where to from here?

Janssen is keen to see that longer term plan from government.

While it was one thing to have reactionary moves last March when the borders slammed shut to help with an immediate threat, 15 months down the track we’ve had time to work out something better than what we have got, he says.

“There are lots of different ways we could do it. But I would have thought by now rather than just plugging those holes and reacting to whichever group are shouting the loudest, we would have thought about what sectors of the economy are struggling, are there really clear shortages and do we better numbers we’ve got if we’re allocating different numbers to different sectors.

“Are we just doing it based on who is yelling at the government loudest, or do we do it based on real need – and a long term need?”

He says while it’s too much to expect a concrete plan right now, some type of plan to give business an idea it is being thought about would inspire confidence.

Muller says the NZTech Digital Tech Critical Workers Pathway Immigration survey will give real data, rather than anecdotes to identify potential areas for improvement. iStart readers are encouraged to complete it.

He expects the data to be collated by the end of the month, complete with plenty of examples and some recommendations for Immigration New Zealand ‘so we can sit with them and work through what the real probability is in different areas’.

“They are standing by waiting for it,” he says.

“This is something companies are not going to solve themselves. We’ve got to collaborate as an industry, rather than all trying and complaining individually. And if there was ever a time for collective impact, this is the time.”

And a footnote: Visa process changes
There’s one other potential stumbling block on the horizon: A new Visa process being introduced in November. It’s a process that will require all employers to be accredited.

Any employer wanting to recruit a migrant from November 1 must be accredited, with accreditation opening in September.

“It doesn’t look onerous or complicated, but you’re talking about an Immigration department that is struggling at the moment with capacity, rolling out an entirely new process and now dealing with tens of thousands employers,” says Janssen.

“Don’t wait for the process to pop up in November. Get ahead of it and start preparing so you can lodge in September when they do an early release, because you can very much expect that it won’t be a quick process.

“If you’re looking to hire a migrant next March and you haven’t done this, you’ll have to do this first before going through the Visa process and suddenly you’re looking at months, rather than weeks.”

Janssen is advocating employers get accredited even if they’re not that likely to need migrant labour.

“Even if you never use it, you’ve got the comfort that once the borders are open if you need to hire a migrant you can do so quickly and not be bogged down by a government process that inevitably will be complicated.”

The post The talent shortage: Scarcity, stinginess, or confusion? appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

As the director of ICT for New Zealand’s biggest council, Auckland Council, he heads up a team of 360 permanent IT staff and 30-50 contract staff handling IT for a vast array of council services.

And at a time when councils are facing reduced revenues and recovery budgets – and for Aucklanders, like many, rates increases – efficiency, increased productivity and reducing costs are critical.

It has been just over a decade since the eight councils within the Auckland region were merged to create the sprawling ‘supercity’ – a $3 billion business, and home to 1.6 million people.

“We are pivoting to make really effective use of the modernised IT landscape we have.”

“Auckland Council has got to a position through the 10 to 11 years we have been together as one organisation where we have become an efficient IT-based organisation and we are pivoting to make really effective use of the modernised IT landscape the council now has,” Denvir says.

It’s a position he believes is enviable and will enable the council to move forward in the transformation of its services more easily than ‘probably most organisations’.

In the coming months, Auckland Council will go public with a ‘significant’ project that will re-imagine the way the heavy, operational side of IT is designed, building in much greater agility to enable IT to respond with speed to changing demands and needs.

Denvir is coy on the plans. It’s a big project and Mayor Phil Goff is likely to want to announce it himself, given the cost savings it is expected to bring Auckland Council.

What Denvir will say is that it is ‘really in the data centre’ and it’s about getting Auckland Council ‘to be really focused on how technology underpins and enables the organisation to be better at the services it provides by putting the agility and flexibility’ into the business that it needs to move forward.

Much of the Auckland Council IT work remains behind the scenes, with citizens largely unaware of the work. That’s just how Denvir likes it.

“As the head of a technology function within a large organisation you would like people not to even understand that the technology is there because it is just enabling the business outcomes, rather than what the technology is,” he says.

“For me what Aucklanders will start to see is the council just being far more effective in the way it is delivering its services as we underpin and enable the organisation to be more efficient.”

Talking IoT, data and digital twins
When it comes to the individual projects, all the usual suspects are there, from IoT and sensors to automation to data and analytics.

A project to create a digital twin for the city was put on the backburner thanks to Covid and the 2020/2021 emergency budget which saw budgets slashed. A year on, however, and Denvir has the funds to scope out the project.

While the original Smart Growth Portal, combining Council geospatial data with that from public sources and central government, was expected to rely on the NEC Kite network platform, Denvir says times have changed.

“Technology develops so rapidly that it makes sense that we go and test the market again for what is the best way for council to achieve their goals,” he says.

The project will bring the physical assets and infrastructure Auckland owns, including stormwater systems, roading and fresh water, to life through a digital twin.

“It would be a great resource not only for council to be better informed in its decision making but also for citizens of Auckland to be able to see what the infrastructure is like in their local region or even under your house. Where are your pipes, where is the stormwater, what is running close by where you are?”

Denvir doesn’t want it to stop just with council owned infrastructure.

“Ideally what you would like to be able to do is sit there with other organisations that have assets in the city, be they power, telecommunications and be able to show where all those assets are.”

One possible use case: Being able to understand the age of all assets in a certain street and syncing up with other infrastructure providers so everyone has the opportunity to maintain assets in one window – and one dig of the road.

Denvir says the future of the project depends on the value it will provide and whether that can be prioritised against all the other demand for council spend.

Sensors, meanwhile, are already being installed on council assets. Denvir sees IoT as a crucial technology for councils.

“I do see us improving the way we look at creating insights in data that allow us to be more effective and for me that will be driven a lot out of what we are doing with sensors.”

Proof of concepts are underway using sensors to capture information to make better use of human resource.

Sensors installed at remote properties, where park rangers need to ensure water supply and maintenance of the properties, mean rangers don’t need to travel to the properties just to check anymore.

Another initiative, launched 18 months ago, sees citizens becoming the council’s eyes. The app and web offering enables anyone to log an issue they see with any council infrastructure, such as a broken public toilet or park bench, or graffiti. Photos can be uploaded and the job is logged with council and passed to either an internal team or external contractor, with the citizen kept up to date on what is happening.

Denvir says the project, launched 18 months ago, just before Covid hit, has seen ‘very significant uptake’.

“We’re very happy with how that has gone, and part of what that has done is made us far more efficient as an organisation. We have automated and really taken a value chain view of that service, so right from the citizen informing us of the problem through to the resolution, where as much as we can we automate that process to keep the people involved informed of how that work is progressing.”

It’s part of a big drive towards increased online capability for the council, which has also introduced online booking and scheduling capabilities for building inspection, and an application for the building inspectors themselves providing a real-time application for completing their inspections.

“We have become far more efficient in our inspection time frames and therefore enabled far more capacity for us to do inspections, just by having a look at our value chain and asking how we can take some of the manual processing to automate our value chain as much as we can.

“And we have seen significant uptake and increase in what we have been able to achieve.”

The bots are here
While the report a problem app uses open APIs for integrations (the council has invested ‘quite heavily’ in an integration capability using Mulesoft), Auckland Council has also had a significant RPA practice for three years and has numerous bots in production.

One key bot takes all the written feedback from community consultations, brings it into the system and themes it.

“This would be an extremely manual process for us in the past. A significant number of man hours, and cost, have been saved by us taking this approach.”

But while technology can be a big winner, Denvir says he’s also very aware that it’s not the solution or way to interact for all citizens.

“We definitely invest in the digital channels as we get some significant efficiencies and therefore manage the money that that ratepayers invest in us to provide those services as effectively as we can, while also being quite aware of the multiple needs for different sections of the community that we have to cater for.”

But there’s potential too, for technology to improve engagement with other sectors of Auckland’s diverse community.

While the Council doesn’t yet have chatbots or digital humans in play, Denvir says it’s on the radar.

“We do see a role for digital natives, or digital bots who can speak to people in their own language and help them navigate the services we have.

“We are very keen to look at ways we can invest in making our services usable across the diverse spectrum of Auckland.”

Closer together
Covid, Denvir says, has brought IT more to the front with a growing understanding of how the technology that is available can help the business move forward.

“That’s only a positive thing,” he says.

Denvir says IT is becoming much closer to the business, moving away from being a behind the scenes IT shop to really being an enabler for the Council.
For Auckland Council that includes embedding some of the IT team closer to business units to work with them on understanding how technology can deliver the business outcomes their seeking.

“As part of that we bring some capabilities to help the business look at new opportunities but also through that we have a better understanding of what the business requirements are. So then we can help scope out what would be the sensible way to take that opportunity or fix the problem and through that we get a voice with the organisation to make sure we have a sensible roadmap of what we can deliver on their behalf.

“It’s extremely important to be able to sit with the business and prioritise with them so they understand the resources that are available and how best to make use of them.”

And it’s not just Auckland Council who could benefit. Denvir says he’s looking at how the some of the technology benefits the council is seeing, can be commoditised to create products to take to market.

“If we can fix problems for Auckland, then not surprisingly they can be used elsewhere in other jurisdictions.

“I personally have a view of ‘how can Auckland, with its ability to invest where others may not, create solutions that other parts of local government New Zealand can also benefit from.”

The post Switched On CIO: Mark Denvir creating council efficiencies appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

Shayne Hunter is unapologetic.

As the Covid pandemic hit, with little initial understanding of the enemy, a rapidly changing situation, and in the face of huge amounts of ‘advice’ and pressure to implement a vast array of technology being touted by companies, New Zealand’s Ministry of Health needed to keep its focus and carve a solid path to solving very real issues.

“One of the biggest challenges we faced really was too many things to do, too many people with great ideas and the need to really understand that technology is an enabler, not the end game,” Hunter, Ministry of Health deputy director-general data and digital, says.

“Innovation is fundamental to transforming the system.”

Hunter and his team were left ‘fending off the pressure for us to implement technology people had that they felt we needed right now’.

“Getting a handle on what the basic business needs were and prioritising those was one of our early challenges,” he says. “When Covid hit our biggest challenge was the need to move at speed. We didn’t really understand the enemy, so to speak. We had a pretty strong sense of what the possibilities were but this thing changed very quickly. So it was really understanding exactly what we needed to focus on.”

While technologies including temperature checking of arrivals at the border were touted, Hunter and his team were guided by the Ministry’s clear strategy around elimination, which saw contact tracing as an important clinical process for managing cases as they occurred.

“We had to very quickly understand all the different ideas, which ones actually might be efficacious, which might support rapid contact tracing… And we landed on something that in the end has been – some people might say pretty basic – but it’s the one that’s been most successful from our point of view.”

The NZ Covid Tracer app was designed, built and deployed, including all support structures, virtually entirely virtually. Today it has more than 2.8 million registered users, albeit users whose enthusiasm for scanning waxes and wanes along with Covid scares.

While there were plenty of criticisms early on about the time it took to release the launch version of the NZ Covid Tracer app, Hunter says when you consider the historical slowness of not just the Ministry of Health but the health sector, ‘it wasn’t slow at all’.

“We had that app from its conception to build in eight weeks, which is not particularly slow.”

Talk to others in the health sector and many point to Hunter as being key to a big change within the Ministry, with projects now moving at much greater speed.

Hunter himself is a proponent of agile and iterative processes. He points to the national contact tracing system, put in place in the early stages of Covid and iterated 21 times in 12 months, and the Covid Tracer app – now on release six, with release seven about to hit and a roadmap out to release nine – as examples of the iterative processes now deployed at the Ministry.

“In the past we would have spent a long time building up a case, a long time going through requirements, then a long time designing and building a system and you would have got release one let’s say in 12 months,” he tells iStart.

“Things can change in 12 months and requirements aren’t clear when you start out, it’s only when you start seeing and playing and using a system that you understand what is right about it and not right about it.

“Our ability to implement something using minimum viable product, getting that in use and then iterating really quickly allows us, in my view, to deliver much more, say in a 12 month window than you normally would.”

It’s also providing more value for money: Spending less for greater return.

“The other thing that is really important is that it gives people confidence that at some point on the journey they will see what they want. That avoids the inevitable upfront issue where everyone wants to tick every box and have every requirement met before they will support a project going forward – which inevitably means you have scope and cost challenges.

“I think this [iterative development] ultimately allows us to move at speed with confidence and support from our users, so it is absolutely invaluable in my opinion.”

While it was a change the Ministry was already embarking on, Covid further accelerated it, and it’s something Hunter says his team has embraced ‘totally’.

For the Ministry the national contact tracing system and Covid Tracer are just parts of an ongoing body of work around Covid, using a mix of different technologies.

When it comes to the vaccination side of things there are four critical technology elements that needed to be put in place. Priority one was to get an immunisation register up and running. Following the favoured iterative style, a basic offering was up and running by the end of last year. It’s based on Salesforce, which the Ministry of Health uses for its population health systems.

The second piece to focus on was an inventory management solution, ensuring robust distribution and inventory systems and processes were in place for the two-dose vaccine, which requires cold chain management. The technologies of choice there were Colossus and Netstop.

It was in place in February, Hunter says, along with work on the vaccine safety monitoring side. That involved working with Dunedin-based Centre for Adverse Reactions to strengthen their systems and be ‘a bit more modern in our approach’ using Azure technologies.

The final area is the booking system, a bolt-on to Salesforce, called Skedulo, which Hunter says the Ministry is working on a couple of pilot sites at the moment.

“They’re all just platforms that we have really configured,” Hunter notes.

If too much to do and too many options were a challenge, so too was making sure there was clear ownership at a business level of what needed to be put in place.

“And at a business level I’m talking about the people who are running the response nationally but also making sure we were looking across the entire sector and really making sure we were responding to the needs of those people and that it wasn’t being lead by the technology people.”

Security and privacy were key factors throughout, along with accessibility for everyone.

The security aspect is one area where Hunter would like to see changes.

“We are always going to be playing a game of cat and mouse with our cybersecurity friends and so making sure we are testing very carefully security of our products and services is really important.

“But I do think we need to get smart about how we do that.

“There is a lot of work that we probably repeat using the current phrase of ‘an abundance of caution’. And we don’t want to put anything at risk, but I do think we can get a little bit smarter about how we go about doing security, but it’s absolutely fundamental and we will continue to emphasis it very heavily.”

There are plenty of areas where Hunter believes there’s room for improvement – and big potential benefits for the health sector and the wider New Zealand community to be had.

He’s ‘delighted’ by the emphasis put last week by Health Minister Andrew Little on the role of digital and data in health. The announcement around the sweeping reforms to New Zealand’s healthcare systems, replacing the 20 District Health Boards with ‘a truly national health service’, also saw a heavy push for greater use of digital technology.

Little noted that consumers have repeatedly asked for the ability to use modern technology, such as virtual diagnostic tests at home, the ability to book doctors’ appointments online and digital monitoring of health conditions.

“With a truly national health service, we can deliver on this promise, setting common standards and improving access, while tailoring services to meet local needs and cutting unnecessary trips to hospitals and clinics,” Little said.

It’s a view shared by Hunter.

“I fundamentally believe that the sustainability of the system and our ability to meet the needs of current and future generations requires us to invest in data and digital technology,” he says.

He says two other areas have been signalled by Little that are particularly important to him: Upskilling the workforce to make sure they are digitally literate and digitally capable and have the right skills to lead system change through digital and data enablement; and the issue of procurement and the need to support innovators.

“Innovation is fundamental to transforming the system,” Hunter says. But he notes that innovators find breaking into government deals difficult because the procurement process tends to be a barrier.

“People who know and understand the art of what is possible with technology, people who are capable of leading digitally enabled change and working in different ways from an agile point of view, they all come together and then obviously the ability to support the innovators, are all really important to supporting the system shift they are looking for.”

But while the health sector often gets a bad rap for being perhaps a little backwards with technology, Hunter is quick to point out the system is in fact more digitally enabled than many realise, with work on a number of national solutions – including the national Health Information Platform (nHIP) which aims to provide a nationwide, standards-based interoperable and data driven foundation – already underway.

Hunter has been pushing greater data sharing too and a business case for a data sharing platform went to Cabinet recently.

“My view is that we have had barriers to sharing data. Some of that is technical, some of it is interpretation of privacy or the health information privacy code.

“There are definitely opportunities that come out of the review recommendations that will allow us to drive that forward. It is fundamental and people actually expect it today. They expect that we are obviously putting all the right controls around it, but their expectation is that they should be able to go anywhere in the health system and if somebody clinically needs to see their health information to support their care, that they can.”

Patients are often surprised to find that’s not the case, with Hunter noting there wouldn’t be a week when he doesn’t get a letter from someone who has been caught out by the lack of data sharing.

“With the appropriate controls in place I am a big supporter of it and we will continue to pursue that. It is one of the planks for improving the health system.”

Through it all, Hunter says he’ll be keeping co-design at the heart of what he does.

“If I think about where we have had success it has all been around co-design and in some cases co-production. Those are fundamental.

“That means working with the community – in our case a community, the DHBs, a health provider, the people who are actually going to be using the technology – and making sure the way we set up a system to support them, will actually support them, that they understand why we are doing it, what’s in it for them and that they influence how it is designed and built.

“That’s absolutely fundamental to our success going forward.”

The post Switched on CIO: Shayne Hunter triages health IT appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

The partner director for Microsoft Aotearoa/New Zealand, Bostwick points to increasing numbers of Microsoft customers, and traditional IT partners, becoming software-as-a-service providers.

The company is signing up around five new SaaS partners a month. It’s the strongest growth area across Microsoft’s 2,500 strong local partner network, Bostwick says. And they’re not all new startups, either. In fact, they’re not even all ‘technology’ businesses – at least not in the traditional sense.

Case in point: Engineering and consulting firm Beca, a Microsoft customer, which has created a software-as-a-service offering, FacilityTwin, that helps its customers manage complex facility management projects.

“You’ve got organisations like Beca who are now wanting to start creating new revenue models.”

“You’ve got organisations like Beca, which for a long time has been a customer of Microsoft and has used some of our software to help support their own internal requirements, who are now wanting to start creating new revenue models.

“They’re asking ‘how do we start unlocking some of the IP we have and making that available to our customers in ways they can consume through SaaS model?’”

Bostwick says it’s a growth area, with a number of Microsoft customers who traditionally provided consulting or services, now digitising some of what they do in order to turn it into a SaaS offering to on sell.

Another case in point: Investment administration services provider MMC has taken its traditional on-promise offering into the cloud as a SaaS platform for fund and wealth management customers.

Traditional IT partners are also keen to digitise their IP. Fusion5 has developed a SaaS HR and payroll solution called Jemini, while Theta Systems has launched a software product division on the back of the success of its Eva visitor management platform. Velocity is helping digitise processes around mortgage application, evaluation and lending, and AsBuilt is designing and developing digital twin capabilities for the construction industry.

And there’s the companies we’re more likely to think of when we think SaaS – the startups who have trodden the well-worn path of venture capital funding and start-up incubators, such as Jobloads, which connects jobseekers looking for seasonal work with the growers directly.

It’s not just a New Zealand phenomenon. Globally companies are increasingly keen.

Bostwick points the finger at Covid as a key reason for the change, saying the push of ordinary, non-tech, businesses creating SaaS offerings as new revenue stream, is part of the global impact of change from the pandemic, which highlighted the need for smart thinking around different ways of doing business to thrive in an uncertain world.

Microsoft’s announcement last year that it is bringing a new data centre region to New Zealand is accelerating the local move, Bostwick says. He says it has resulted in plenty of new discussions with organisations wanting to capitalise on having a hyperscale cloud platform available in country.

“It has really unlocked a lot of ideation and imagining and discussion around how organisations can take advantage of that,” Bostwick says.

A recent IDC whitepaper certainly paints a rosy picture on the back of the new data centre region. It predicts public cloud adoption and spending in New Zealand will more than double within five years. Cloud services currently contribute around NZ$12.7 billion of revenue a year to local businesses. That’s expected to increase by NZ$30 billion within the next four years on the back of the forthcoming data centre region, which is also expected to generate an additional 102,000 jobs over the same period.

“One of the reasons software companies want to build on global hyperscale cloud platforms is that it enables them to scale and take their service globally,” Bostwick says.

“In the case of Velocity, they’re now working across Australia and they’re launching into India, and they can do that with a relatively small footprint on the ground in those countries, because effectively the value they have created is in the software. It’s SaaS, it’s subscription based and once they land that in with a customer, like a bank or lending organisation, they can support it pretty much from anywhere.

Challenges ahead
But while Bostwick might be enthusiastic about the ‘massive’ potential for businesses everywhere to harness their IP up and create new SaaS offerings, there are still issues to be overcome. Top of the list is the old chestnut of people and skills. It’s the number one issue Bostwick hears from partners and customers looking to develop digital products and platforms.

For its part, Microsoft is using its LinkedIn platform, and LinkedIn Learning to push skills training, and working with partners including Ace and Auldhouse to come up with ‘creative and innovative’ ways to make it easier to get certified on cloud platforms such as Azure – certification that acknowledges that many of those wanting the training already have a background in technology but now want to become expert at cloud technologies.

But there’s also a big business challenge, Bostwick says.

“At some point organisations have to take step to go ‘I’m going to invest in this new capability, I’m going to take the opportunity to build a business case, to test it, partner with entity like Microsoft to get access to the tools and platforms I need to be successful, and I’m going to go ahead and get going on it’.”

That can be a big hurdle for organisations who often have a very different business model, relying on project revenue.

“Now you’re saying you need to start thinking about the future revenue stream where you might be selling software or software capability. It’s that whole business evolution and business change where you go from a legacy business model to a future business model. so the cost of change and the process for change can sometimes be something that organisations need support and help to work through.”

There’s another, less obvious, issue Bostwick sees as key: A lack of software project management skills.

“One of the things we have identified is that there is a real shortage in some really critical skill sets and one of those is product management. There havent been that many software product managers in New Zealand up until now, but if you think about Xero, Cin7, Vista – all successful NZ software companies – one of the things really critical to their success is having really strong product management.  That is all about identifying what customer needs are, building a feature roadmap, aligning with engineering efforts and financial/commercial constraints you are working within to deliver on and managing the lifecycle of that software product.

Bostwick doesn’t have a solution. It’s something he says Microsoft is working on.

“It is absolutely an area we are focused on and an area we are working with partners on,” he says.

The post The new breed of SaaS companies appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

Last month Xero announced its plans to acquire Swedish e-invoicing access point provider Tickstar in a $25 million deal which will enable Xero to host its own access points and reduce reliance on third party providers.

Xero’s chief product officer, Anna Curzon, says the move is an important step in the company’s strategy to help small businesses digitise more of their workflows and get paid faster using cloud-based technologies.

“Processing of invoices is unproductive.”

It’s a move that also signals the slow groundswell around e-invoicing – the direct digital exchange of invoices between the supplier and buyer’s financial systems (and we’re not talking sending PDFs here.) Using accounting or ERP software and accredited access points – essentially gateways – companies can exchange invoices one to many.

It’s a technology long touted for its potential benefits, from increased efficiency and accuracy to security. New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) estimates savings of $500 million a year if all invoicing was e-invoicing, while the Australian Taxation Office says e-invoices save $17 on emailed PDF invoices and $20 on paper invoices – big dollars in a country where more than one billion invoices are sent annually.

For many businesses, the lure is in the cold hard cash: E-invoicing offers potential for faster payments. In Australia, where the government has mandated e-invoicing for federal government departments, e-invoices are paid in five days.

“Processing of invoices is unproductive,” an MBIE spokesperson told iStart.

“E-invoicing enables fast, secure and accurate transmission of invoices which reduces cost and enables faster payments to businesses which is especially important at this time.”

But the move towards e-invoicing across Australia, and in particular New Zealand, has often seemed slow. A trans-Tasman Electronic Invoicing Arrangement was signed back in 2018. By early 2019, the Australian and New Zealand governments announced the adoption of the Peppol (Pan-European Public Procurement Online) framework for a trans-Tasman e-invoicing framework, which came into play later that year.

As part of the 2020-21 budget the Australian Government announced it would look to accelerate adoption of Peppol e-invoicing, starting with the public sector. There’s now a mandate for federal government departments to receive e-invoices, and a Treasury e-invoicing consultation paper, released late last year, also floated the option of mandating that all businesses, big and small, be able to send and receive Peppol e-invoices. It’s one of three options still on the table. Also being considered are that only large businesses be required to send and receive e-invoices, and the option of a non-regulatory approach.

The suggestion of mandating e-invoices for all businesses has been welcomed by some such as some Fintech Australia members who want to see all GST registered businesses required to be able to send and receive e-invoices. Others are less enthused. The Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand and the Institute of Public Accountants have urged government to hold off on any plans, amid concerns that the sector lacks the capacity to cope at the moment and that the additional costs could see other more beneficial investments waylaid.

Across the ditch in New Zealand, MBIE is considering the costs and benefits of a mandate for central government to use e-invoicing, the spokesperson told iStart.

For now, however ‘our approach is to work with government to enable them to realise the benefits of e-invoicing’ the spokesperson says.

“We’ve also identified a number of the key suppliers to government and are working with them to have the capability to send e-invoices.”

There are currently 21 accredited services providers in New Zealand and MBIE says it is currently in the process of selecting a smaller panel of providers – expected to be in place by the end of April – which government entities can select from in an effort to spur government adoption. Australia already has a similar panel in place.

Sam Hassan, CTO for e-invoicing access point Link-4, says back in 2016 when the company started it was one of very few looking at e-invoicing. He admits that even today, there are hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands, of businesses across Australia and New Zealand that know little about e-invoicing.

Asked about demand for e-invoicing in New Zealand, a Xero spokesperson is blunt: “Not a lot, in fact almost nothing.

“We are ready to go from a send and receive perspective, but the education job in New Zealand just hasn’t been done. We’re not there as a country yet, we’re still in the infancy when it comes to e-invoicing.”

Hassan believes the launch of the Kiwi Peppol panel of service providers will drive adoption of e-invoicing at least within the New Zealand government sector. But he too wants to see more education on the topic, and potential incentives – such as the five day payments offered in Australia – to drive small businesses to adopt the technology.

MBIE says a communications program around e-invoicing will be rolled out in the next three months. Hassan is also pushing for mandating of e-invoicing, if not for business, at least for government agencies, saying that’s where big inroads could be made.

That’s not to say e-invoicing is being completely ignored. Link-4 has more than 3,000 customers across Australia, New Zealand and Singapore using the system and is working wth software providers including MYOB and Intuit Quickbooks to make e-invoicing available for all their users.

Hassan says some enterprise businesses are now requiring smaller businesses they deal with to use e-invoicing for the simple ease of use and removal of manual data entry of invoices. On the small business side, the lure of quicker payments is paving the way, along with time saving.

“We have heard from some suppliers that they’re doing five or six phone calls for each invoice – that’s a lot of time tracking and tracing for a small business.”

There’s another factor which could help e-invoicing gain further traction: Fraud.

“We have seen recenlty many cases of invoice fraud that cost small businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars sometimes, and in general costs our economy millions of dollars a year,” Hassan says.

More than AU$14 million last year, in fact. At least that’s the figure for payment redirection scams reported to Australia’s Scamwatch last year, with the ACCC warning average losses so far in 2021 are more than five times higher than average losses at the same time last year.

“With e-invoices you eliminate that problem significantly,” Hassan says.

So will Xero’s Tickstar deal further drive the market towards e-invoicing? Xero is certainly hoping so, as is Hassan.

He says it’s a good sign with software providers keen to partner, or buy, access points. “That is a good indication to other software providers of what they need to do and they need to start looking at either acquiring or working with access points in the market to be ready for the next wave.”

But Xero’s deal could also have some negative consequences for its marketplace partners. While the vendor has said it will remain open software for e-invoicing access points, Xero users are likely to favour an access point already included in Xero’s offering, rather than seeking a third party provider. That might remove the challenge for small businesses, but will it also kill off some of the access point market?

Hassan doesn’t think so, though he acknowledges that access points which only provide basic services are likely to feel some impact. (Link-4 includes extras such as validations and workflow.)

“A lot of companies have additional requirements to just the sending and receiving that a basic access point comes with.

“But at the same time, more businesses are going to be able to send and, on the other side, should be able to receive invoices using Quickbooks or SAP or Oracle, so there will be more demand in the market. I think that will push the market for other access providers to other businesses as companies look for access points so they can start interacting with customers and suppliers who are using Xero.”

The post E-invoicing: Because cashflow is king appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

Zag’s Nick Mulcahy is pragmatic about SAP’s much heralded ‘Rise with SAP’ – designed to help accelerate S/4HANA cloud adoption – describing it as more of a natural evolution of SAP’s cloud offering, rather than a revolutionary change.

SAP announced the Rise program, which bundles application licensing, managed cloud infrastructure and managed services into a single subscription offering, in late January, coining it ‘business transformation-as-a-service.’

Put in the investment upfront to make sure you don’t close the door to future transformation

The promise? Lowering total cost of ownership by up to 20 percent, along with easier cloud migration, faster time to value and greater flexibility.

However, Mulcahy, CEO for SAP consultancy Zag, part of Accenture, says in the early days at least, the biggest benefit for customers will be a little more straight-forward: Contract simplification.

“If you were to sign up to an offer similar to Rise, currently it would require multiple contracts, all with their own terms and conditions and hundreds of pages of legal documents,”

“There are a few interesting services that are bundled in the Rise offering that were not there with S/4HANA, but it is still in its infancy phase. We’re looking to see where we get to by the end of 2021.”

What we do know is that customers will be able to choose their deployment – public cloud or private cloud – and there are four categories of additional services: Tools and services to help customers migrate, the business process optimisation promised bythe Signavio acquisition, additional offerings from the Business Technology Platform, and the ability to bundle offerings from the wider business network.

“With the first category, there are tools and services to help you migrate if you are already in ERP and trying to migrate your S/4HANA solution up into SAP’s cloud offering with Rise.”

The tools, such as readiness checks and making sure code is ready to go, already exist today, but now bundled in are options for learning hub licenses, ensuring customers are more prepared for S/4HANA.

Some of the services available on the Business Technology Platform, the new iteration of SAP Cloud Platform, are also available for bundling, including Cloud Platform Integration, SAP Analytics Cloud and intelligent Robotic Process Automation.

The final area is around the business network – the ability to bundle the Ariba Network, the Asset Intelligent Network or Logistic Business Frameworks.

“They can now be bundled into the single subscription license as well. So, if you have issues around procurement, or want to automate some of your procurement processes, there is opportunity to integrate those into the single license under Rise.”

But there are some key components in SAP’s stable that do not look to be part of Rise, at least, not for now, including SuccessFactors, Concur and C/4HANA.

Despite that, Rise has already won some local fans. Mulcahy says, with one customer already on Rise another in the presales phase and others considering Zag’s roadmap assessment to understand if the program is the right avenue for them.

Mulcahy says the potential uptake in Australia – and the rest of the world – is likely to be greater.

For now, with Rise still in its infancy, Mulcahy says there are two main use cases for the new offering: Those already on ERP and wanting to shift to the public cloud quickly with extras such as the analytics cloud; and those who do not want to be burdened by frequent upgrade cycles and are finding the private cloud option attractive.

SAP has 20+ industry solutions which are only available on private cloud.

As with any multi-pronged product strategy, there are caveats, and Mulcahy is clear customers need to think carefully with consideration of their future business aspirations, particularly given that there is no migration path between S/4HANA public cloud with Rise and S/4HANA private cloud with Rise.

“So, if you are a retailer trying to do a quick public cloud implementation in finance for example, and then at a later stage you want SAP’s full blown retail system, you’ll find yourself on the wrong version.

“You really need to put in that investment upfront to make sure you don’t close the door to future transformation and future innovation by going with a fast public cloud implementation and then wishing you had actually kept the door open to the future by being able to add on applications and other bolt-ons.”

FURTHER READING

The evolving role of AI in business technology

March 18, 2025 | Hayden McCall

Are buyers looking for AI features? Or is the reverse more true?

E-invoicing: Because cashflow is king

April 9, 2021 | Heather Wright

Xero deals and MBIE and Aussie govt plans…

Best practise ERP selection and evaluation

October 8, 2020 | Hayden McCall

Five tips that can change fortunes…

ERP market gets cloudier

October 7, 2020 | Heather Wright

Covid-19 has created a clash of market drivers. Which will out?…

SAP customers proactive with S/4HANA upgrades

April 15, 2020 | Donovan Jackson

Zag CEO shares perspectives on ERP vendor developments, digital business and S/4HANA value…

The post Will local SAP customers Rise to cloud transition? appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

The CEO of Mercy Radiology and head of digital health for parent company Healthcare Holdings, McCann believes bionic workforces – the melding of the best of technology with the best of human workforces – have huge potential.

For McCann, robotic process automation is a big part of the vision, and he’s putting that into action at Mercy Radiology, where two robots are providing benefits including a $200,000 net benefit per month in cashflow, efficiency and accuracy gains – and an increased staff satisfaction.

“The unfortunate thing about health – and it’s not dissimilar to many other industries – is that we are stuck with a lot of legacy infrastructure,” McCann says.

“We need to keep that external view around technology so that we don’t miss a trick in the potential benefits it brings.”

Many of the key systems Mercy Radiology uses, including the key Radiology Information System (RIS) and the picture archiving and communication system, are applications that have been with the organisation ‘since day dot’ and hold reams of rich data. While they’ve evolved, they have limitations.

“You can add bolt-ons and there are opportunities to have some direct integrations between systems – and we do that in some instances – but what we found was the RPA approach is a very cost effective and a very safe approach to maximising the benefits you get from your legacy systems without needing to do expensive integrations,” McCann says.

“One thing people often forget with integration work is every time there is then an upgrade to an existing legacy system that has a connection to another system, you have to test that integration point. Those integration points can break.

“With the robotic worker in essence what we have got is a login for that worker and as long as they have the login to the application and system, they can continue working irrespect of upgrades.”

Mercy Radiology’s RPA journey started more than two years ago. It rolled out its first robot, Matilda, in 2019 to handle ACC invoicing and receipting.

The organisation was considering employing an additional FTE to the finance team.

“The investment to deploy the RPA solution and the ongoing investment in support and maintenance fees was less than going out to hire a new person who would cost the organisation around $70,000 [plus additional costs for equipment and space for them],” McCann says.

McCann challenged local RPA provider Virtual Blue – reseller for Blue Prism RPA – to have a robot up and running in six weeks. They delivered and robot Matilda quickly provided benefits.

Where previously two staff members performed the invoicing and receipting on a weekly basis – a process that took between four and six hours – Matilda could do the task in just one hour, enabling Mercy to move to daily invoicing. That improved cashflow for the organisation, providing a $200,000 net benefit per month.

The two staff meanwhile were freed up from the manual, repetitive task to do other work including training internal teams. That training, combined with Matilda’s low error rate, has improved data quality, reducing error rates when it comes to the invoicing and receipting process by around 10 percent.

Matilda’s work has since expanded to additional invoicing and receipting for Southern Cross Insurance, NIB and the Ministry of Health work, handling around 600 to 700 invoices a day.

Risks and benefits
But there’s another key benefit that McCann can’t put a monetary value on: Reducing key person risk.

“The key thing that was highlighted to me when we commenced the journey was all the knowledge and subject expertise around that process sat with two members of our team.

“That was a very uncomfortable realisation for me in terms of key person risk.”

McCann was very aware that if they left the organisation, they’d take with them crucial knowledge and Mercy Radiology would lose ‘a significant period of time’ to get new people to gain the skills and knowledge to run those processes.

“Now we really see the robotic workers as part of the solution in managing some of that key person risk across the organisation, because one of the things we needed to do when we deployed those processes was to understand them in quite a bit of detail to codify and document them. Now there is an artefact that shifted an individual’s tacit knowledge and made it explicit knowledge for the organisation as well.”

McCann says while RPA has always been a key component of Mercy Radiology’s digital strategy, it’s now also viewed as part of the organisation’s workforce strategy as well.

Matilda’s success, meanwhile, was such that within three months, Mercy Radiology was looking for other processes it could deploy RPA on.

Rob-E was deployed to handle onboarding staff, entering the required data into a range of systems.

It quickly became clear that there was also an opportunity to leverage the robotic workers in the patient facing and clinical side work as well.

Today, Rob-E supports Mercy Radiology’s team in managing online bookings.

The organisation is the first radiology provider in New Zealand to enable patients to book scans and xrays online, and uses Rob-E to transfer data from the online booking system to the RIS. The robot processes more than 1,100 bookings a month with 90 percent of appointments requiring no human intervention, freeing up human call centre staff, who previously handled that work, to spend time addressing patient issues in a more timely way.

But Rob-E’s deployment also proved a slight misstep for McCann. Like the deployment of Matilda, he put a time frame on having Rob-E handling online bookings. Rob-E’s launch in online booking work saw him getting plenty of ribbing from his human colleagues for his error rate – some 30 percent. While he now has a success rate of 98 percent, McCann admits he may have wanted the team to go a little too fast in deploying him.

“The lesson there is do set yourself goals and targets, but it’s often better to spend a bit more time on something so that by the time you deploy it you’ve got good confidence that the robotic worker is going to perform quite well.”

Rob-E’s work wasn’t done however, and it’s on the referral side that things get more interesting. While some referrals come in electronically, many still come in handwritten, leaving staff with the laborious task of decoding often notoriously bad doctor’s handwriting and entering it into the RIS.

Mercy combined RPA with optical character recognition technology and ‘taught’ Rob-E to read those messy handwritten referrals, using 20 years of stored data.

That volume of data enabled Rob-E to get up to speed relatively quickly with a 90 percent accuracy rate in initial testing. That’s increased over the past four months to 98 percent.

Both Matilda and Rob-E still have capacity for additional work and the success of Mercy Radiology’s work is such that parent company Healthcare Holdings is now eyeing up RPA for deployment across it’s wider operations.

Rob-E has already been put to work handling Mercy Ascot Hospital’s onboarding processes.

And the inevitable question of staff losing jobs to robots?

McCann admits in the early days staff were wary, but today staff satisfaction in the teams affected by RPA is up – something he attributes in part to the robotic helpers.

“We saw a direct relationship to when Matilda and Rob-E got introduced in terms of staff workload. People had the opportunity to utilise their time more productively and more effectively and do value add activities, and we saw a 5-10 percent increase in staff satisfaction.”

Across both robots and all processes, there are very clear delineations as to what the robotic workers can do and when hand off to humans is required.

Adding AI into the mix
McCann says Mercy Radiology has a roadmap of processes it’s looking at for possible RPA deployments and is looking increasingly to combine technologies such as AI, machine learning and other OCR use cases with the robots to enable them to perform a wider range of tasks.

Under consideration is the potential of using a robot to notify patients of negative lung screening results – something already done in the UK’s NHS using Blue Prism technology.

It’s not all about robots though.

Mercy Radiology is already utilising AI in a diagnostic sense, deploying AI algorithms to assist radiologists in a second read capacity for peripheral limb fractures and lung nodules on CT scans.

“We’re finding that the algorithms are really augmenting the human workflow, picking up on potential misses when they occur.”

Just how good? Well they’re picking up on at least one clinically significant peripheral fracture omission per day, and one lung nodule omission every three days. For an industry where the human error rate is around 30 percent for radiologists reviewing and issuing reports, those results are a not insignificant opportunity to plug the gap and reduce omission rates.

McCann admits there is a ‘bionic balance’ to be struck in getting the best from both human and robotic teams, with the potential for empathy or high touch to get lost, particularly on the patient facing side.

That’s something he says Mercy is ‘balancing quite well’ now, but will need to keep an eye on as it continues to expand the use and scope of robotic workers.

As to Mercy Radiology’s bionic journey, McCann says it will never be completed.

“What we have learned is that we need to keep that external view around what technology is able to do and how technology is being deployed so that we don’t miss a trick in terms of the potential benefits and opportunity it brings into the organisation.”

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