The shared service organisation, healthAlliance, has 252 IT staff managing more than 15,000 screens across the district health boards of Northland, Waitemata, Auckland and Counties Manukau. It services more than 26,000 users across the four Northern Region DHBs, making it the second major public agency merger here following the formation of the Auckland Council.
Vendrig says his focus is on consolidating and integrating the teams to improve productivity and efficiency in the next three months.
“Our demand keeps growing and the DHBs can’t afford to keep growing their costs, so what we are trying to do is meet the increased demand for IT services without necessarily increasing the IT staff,” Vendrig tells CIO.
At the Bank of New Zealand, the role of former CIO Peter Yarrington has been restructured into two roles now held by Goldsmith and Paul Tait.
Tait, meanwhile, was appointed in March as head of technology and channels innovation. In this role he is charged with developing the strategy, planning and innovation for the future of the bank’s technology platform.
In another development, Rhys Gould has left his CIO role at Downer to take up the role of managing director of REM Building, which is undertaking major repair work for two major insurance companies in the Canterbury region. “We have recently established a new home building division together with the acquisition of a Signature Homes Franchise to enable us to undertake new home building (on a large scale basis) for clients whom have unfortunately loss their homes during the recent earthquakes,” says Gould of his role at REM Building. “Over the next five years, we will be responsible for providing over 600 new homes and undertaking major repairs to approximately 400 severely damaged homes.”
Gould brings to REM Building an extensive experience in the civil engineering industry and as a certified project management professional. He was with Downer for three years and before that, was with Fulton Hogan for 17 years, the last four and a half years as its CIO.
The Downer ICT team is now headed by David Pearce, general manager IT NZ.
These new appointments come in the wake of two other CIO roles that have been disestablished locally – at the Warehouse and Yellow.
McCall says he leaves the Warehouse with several successful projects having been completed, which included creating a high-performing IS team who improved service levels (reducing time to resolve by 99 percent), reduced IS operational costs by 40 percent, along with a successful upgrade of all core systems on time and on budget that secured a major turnaround in internal customer satisfaction.
He says the ICT team also added significant value to the organisation through the successful delivery of the IS programme, which he says “consistently over delivered on promised benefits”.
At Yellow, CIO Steven Mayo-Smith was made redundant after just two months in the role. The move was part of a company restructure following a change in board and CEO.