Clarence Yap takes IT helm of AHPRA

Clarence Yap, group CIO of Smartgroup, has started a new position as CIO (interim) at AHPRA (Australia Health Practitioner Regulation Agency).

The AHPRA role was formerly held by Graeme Dunn, who left late last year to take on the CIO role at ESTA (Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority).

While in the AHPRA role, Dunn said the organisation was in “the midst of a transformation program – paving the way for a new way of working through change initiatives that provide simplified and nationally consistent processes, robust frameworks and technologies leading to our vision of being a leading risk-based regulator.”

Now appointed to the interim role, Yap will lead AHPRA’s technology function and transformation for the national organisation with the responsibility for administering the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme in relation to more than 700,000 health practitioners across Australia.

At Smartgroup for over two years, Yap was initially recruited by the CEO and board as Smargroup’s first ever CIO to lead the IT function and help Smartgroup grow into an ASX200 company through constant MAs and organic growth.

He oversaw all IT functions including application development and support, SaaS and private/public cloud management, technical support, innovations, vendor management, financial management and disaster recovery planning.

While at Smartgroup, some of his major achievements include: restructuring IT into a standard op model and based on ITIL with clear accountabilities; and improving stability of systems and infrastructure to attain uptime of gt; 99 per cent; improved IT governance and risk capabilities with stronger IT security and IT general controls. He also consolidated and integrated IT environments for eight MA opportunities at Smartgroup in 2 years.

He was also selected in the CIO50 List in 2018.