Updated: National Heart Foundation promotes Shane Riddle to CIO

Shane Riddle has been promoted to the newly created CIO role at the National Heart Foundation (NHF) of Australia. Riddle had been national ICT manager for the past 11 months.

As ICT manager, Riddle led the IT team that moved the organisation from legacy in house systems and processes to a cloud-based architecture.

In the new role, he will continue to undertake large business transformation projects. He will continue to migrate to the cloud, as well as work on several key projects including putting grants processing online, as well as delivering a single view of the customer.

“From a grants processing point of view, we are the largest provider of funds outside of the government.This year, we are processing about $17 million worth of grants so we’re creating an online portal for the applications and the peer review,” he said.

“Another key project is our single view of customer and that is a massive undertaking. We have many disparate data sets across the organisation so I need to map all of that out. I am currently in Stage 3 of the 5-Stage process. I’ve done my discovery stage, which was mapping out all the business rules, the data repositories and data sets and where they reside across the company and how they interact with each other. And then I have moved on to understanding who our customer is.”

Across the organisation, he said he can frame the context of its customers in 52 different ways. “When I start talking about the ‘generic customer’, and creating a single customer view, we need to be able to frame that correctly for whoever is viewing it internally.”

The rollout of the Heart Attack Survivor Support (HASS) project is another big focus for Riddle. “This is a major piece of work we are focusing on. From a technology perspective, we are blending what was traditionally hard copy books and information handed across to heart attack survivors as they are recovering, but also introducing it online.”

Prior to joining the Heart Foundation in April 2016, Riddle was the general manager of marketing information systems for BIG4 Holiday Parks of Australia. He was responsible for advice and direction on effective use of technology including the adoption of web, social media and a reservations system.

During his time at BIG4, he worked on five key tech projects. For example, he planned, built and delivered on time and in budget BIG4’s new Loyalty program, whose members generate approximately $60 million of yearly revenue direct to parks.

Prior to BIG4, he was the general manager of IT for The Warranty Group, where he designed and led the project to develop AON Warranty’s proprietary phone sales recording and training from concept to the marketplace, creating a return on investment in 9 months.

Fighting the good fight

Riddle said he’s excited to take on the newly created CIO role, and blending his technology and strategic work with the implementation of the company’s objectives. “I took the role because I see so many opportunities associated with the good work that’s being done. Every 27 minutes someone dies from a heart attack across Australia. So we’re fighting the good fight and it is great to be able to be part of that.”

He recognises the main challenges in the role. “We have gone very much from worrying about keeping the lights on to how we engage with the business. From a technology point of view, our role and our mandate is to ensure that we are engaging with the business, and we are delivering what they need to be able to deliver their objectives.”

Before he joined 11 months ago, he said the foundation outsourced all of its internal helpdesk and support as part of its newly created strategy. “So the mandate for us, in the IT department, is to be a business enabler.”