Future CIO of the Year: Hartley Holtzhauzen, Auckland Council

For Hartley Holtzhauzen, infrastructure services manager, Auckland Council, is moving mountains of his own.

Voted as the Future CIO of the Year and ICT Manager of the Year at the inaugural Computerworld NZ IT Leaders Award 2014, Holtzhauzen is meticulously leading Auckland Council’s major infrastructure services transformation program.

Promoted into the IS enterprise services infrastructure manager role in May 2013, Holtzhauzen has 20 years of IT experience to draw on, and has spearheaded Australasia’s largest council into modern era with a mixture of technical nous and strong leadership.

He received the special commendation for his role steering the City of into a new era of technology - combining the ICT functions of the previous regional council and the region's seven city and district councils into one ‘super council’.

Overseeing the implementation of a new telephony service for Auckland Council’s Customer Services Centres, Holtzhauzen also delivered an 8,000-plus desktop Windows XP migration as well as overseeing the transition of over 2000 servers from 13 legacy data centres to a third party IaaS platform.

All, as Mike Foley, Head of Information Services, Auckland Council attests; “without significant outages or customer impact”.

Holtzhauzen attributes the gains of this team in the past 12 months to an unwavering focus on the “big rocks” of Auckland Council’s ICT infrastructure.

“We need to focus on the big rocks,” reaffirms Holtzhauzen, who joined Auckland Council in October 2011 following his role as EMEA regional head of IT at investment bank firm Babcock & Brown in the UK.

“We’re transforming the Council from eight legacy environments and to do this we need to build the foundations, much like laying the groundwork for a multi-storey building.

“Any efficient IS organisation needs to possess a solid foundation and operate on a network that is robust, scalable and agile enough to deliver on the new cutting-edge technology and business opportunities coming into the workplace.”

Stepping into a challenging role from the offset, Holtzhauzen was tasked with supporting multiple legacy council environments across varied domains and unsurprising given the magnitude of the shift, the transition created notable challenges within the infrastructure arena.

Taking charge following a top-level transformation of Auckland Council’s IS, led chiefly by Foley and his operations team, Holtzhauzen guided the much-publicised migration away from Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system, onto the supported Windows 7 platform.

Working to an end-of-support deadline imposed by Redmond, Holtzhauzen admits that on the day of April 8, 2014, it “simply wasn’t an option to still be operating on Windows XP.”

“It was non-negotiable,” Holtzhauzen recalls. “We acknowledged the deadline and understood the significance of exposing the Council after this date, and considering Microsoft’s end of support bills ran into the millions we were under great pressure to initiate a smooth transition to Windows 7.”

Alluding again to the Council’s key “big rocks” consisting of desktop, data centres and telephony, Holtzhauzen admits that on a personal level, transitioning from the global investment banking industry to local government triggered a much-deeper impact on his decision making processes.

Aside from the complex nature of the IS transformation, the nature of Holtzhauzen’s previous role in the UK was a role, in comparison to Council, luxuriated around little funding limitations and crucially, little public scrutiny.

“To try and achieve a world class IS transformation with a limited budget is of course a new challenge for me,” says Holtzhauzen.

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“It may sound cliched but I consider New Zealand my home and I do take it personally, says Holtzhauzen, who is from Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

“Every day I understand that I’m accountable and every decision I make always comes back to how it will impact the ratepayer.

“It’s good to make a difference to the beautiful city that I live in and it’s something I take with me as I engage with vendors and our strategic partners because - it always boils down to, are we getting the best value?”

As the boundaries between business and ICT continues to blur at an accelerating pace, Holtzhauzen, who completed a Masters degree in Business Information Technology in the UK, displays the visionary qualities of the future CIO.

Heralding a new form of leadership across organisations, Gartner’s promotion of “every business is a digital business” provides food for thought for Holtzhauzen, who understands the need for IT and the boardroom to collaborate closer at a decision-making level.

“There’s a lot of talk about IT getting to know the business a lot closer and this has always been the start of my journey,” adds Holtzhauzen, who posseses senior level international experience in management of IT teams, servers and storage, network infrastructures, client technology and business applications.

“One my most valuable experiences working at local government level has been working with the business closely and not only understanding what they’re trying to achieve, but articulating this in technology talk.

“A significant gap still remains but the onus is on IT to demonstrate it can deliver the big rocks because once it does, it can then sit around the board table and add value.”

Operating as a leader with good humour and personable skills to match, Holtzhauzen heads a team of 32 in Auckland Council’s Albert Street office, a team he acknowledges as being almost ‘mission-critical’ during the IS process.

“We’ve had a busy year and it’s not often you get the chance to pause and acknowledge your achievements,” he reflects. “But it’s testament to my great operations team who, despite going through changes which impacted them personally, still managed to pull it together and not drop the ball.”

Embarking on his career as a hardware engineer at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in 1994, Holtzhauzen’s “bottom-up” approach to ICT has helped garner the respect of his colleagues, an aspect of his role that can only be achieved through experiencing, and occasionally enduring, the unpredictable world of ICT.

“Your team needs to trust you and know you’re competent,” he adds. “I’m appreciative of the fact that I started my career bottom-up and have been privileged enough to be given opportunities along the way to work in different areas of IS.

“You need to know your stuff and instil confidence in your team. I’m a big believer in being personable, taking an interest in their lives and generally leading by example.”

Holtzhauzen is quietly and confidently shifting big rocks into place, not only in the Auckland Council, but also in his career. And, as the judges saw it, he clearly has the edge as a future CIO.

James Henderson (james_henderson@idg.co.nz) is the editor of Computerworld New Zealand.