CIO 100: New Zealand Transport Agency

THE NEW ZEALAND Transport Agency is a prime example of how an organisation is adapting and transforming as it moves to digital platforms.

CIO Craig Soutar says the NZTA’s major IS projects for the year are connected with this fundamental shift.

NZTA’s biggest projects in the next 12 months are moving from paper to digital processes, digital business enablers including enterprise service bus (ESB), facilities migration to cloud, strategic business intelligence foundations and telecommunications-as-a-service.

He says the biggest contributions for the business delivered by the ICT team in the past year included the Agency’s first reusable common payment service to support new Toll Roads, an enterprise content-management-as-a-service for documents and workf low, plus common web platform for digital business.

The ICT team has further plans to invest in reusable web services including new customer web services, with the next candidate practical driving test booking.

Soutar sees the continuing trend from last year of having an increase across the Transport Agency in the financial and capability investment of information and technology.

Initiatives that will drive the most investment this year are in business intelligence and analytics, knowledge professionals’ culture change programme, cloud, customer experience technologies, machine to machine and Internet of Things, and digital projects.

Soutar says among the challenges the IT organisation will face in the year ahead are managing complexity across a federated model – in the Transport Agency and sector – and moving to digital platforms while implementing bi-modal IT.

Focus on customers and their needs continue to be fundamental in business decisions at NZTA, and its public facing systems reflect this. The NZTA actively seeks customer feedback and directs relevant teams, including ICT, to use this information for continuous improvement.