Tourism Australia CIO Dave Rumsey quits

Tourism Australia’s CIO, Dave Rumsey is moving on from the organisation after five years in the role.

Rumsey told CIO Australia that he has driven significant transformation across the organisation and leaving at the end of this year is the right time as a significant phase of this project will be complete.

“The technology solutions proposed by our new media agency, UM will be embedded in our data team and is now established with the right tools to take Tourism Australia to the next level of data-driven marketing,” Rumsey said.

“There are still many exciting initiatives ahead of Tourism Australia and I’ve had a blast but I felt that the end of 2016 was a good time for me to step away and start the next chapter of my career,” he said.

Rumsey said he was looking at new opportunities in Australia and Asia.

“I am also looking at doing some consulting for the first half of 2017, specifically around digital transformation. I hope to stay in the travel vertical because it’s such a fun industry but I am not wedded to that,” he said.

Rumsey said one of his biggest achievements in the role was transforming his IT team so it could deliver on a corporate system change program. This included replacing legacy Oracle systems with Microsoft Dynamics, enabling the move to Office365 and the deployment of Microsoft Surface Pro devices globally.

“Secondly, establishing a tight and effective working relationship with the two CMOs, Nick Baker previously and then Lisa Ronson over the past 18 months or so. This has enabled many digital initiatives including our re-platform to Adobe Marketing Cloud for our B2C sites, Australia.com, Australia.cn in China and also our B2B sites aussiespecialist.com and aussiespecialist.cn,” he said.

Rumsey was previously director, corporate and shared services reform at Family Community Services, and manager, IT service delivery at Housing NSW.