The three district health boards in Auckland and the Northland district health board are merging their non-clinical services into one organisation, to be known as healthAlliance New Zealand Ltd. The shared services operation is the latest large scale public sector merger following the creation of the Auckland Supercity. Barry Vryenhoek has been appointed as the new chief executive of the organisation and will start his role on March 14. Vryenhoek has held several corporate services and operations leadership roles with the NZ Army, where he is currently General Manager of Corporate Support and Chief Financial Officer (Army). It is not yet known whether a CIO will be appointed for the new organisation, or what the reporting lines will be for the information services teams. The merger covers healthAlliance, the shared services organisation for the Waitemata and Counties Manukau District Health Boards; the Auckland District Health Board; and the Northland District Health Board. The three entities all have CIOs. The support functions provided by the new healthAlliance will be for non-clinical services namely procurement and supply chain, finance, information services, staff service centre (payroll processing), business solutions and the Auckland Regional Internal Audit Service, according to Michelle Noakes, business communications specialist at healthAlliance. The three are listed in the MIS100 report on the top IT using organisations in New Zealand. According to the 2010 report, the screen numbers for each of the organisations are 7894 for healthAlliance; 6410 for the Auckland District Health Board; and 2942 for the Northland District Health Board. The figures include all desktops, laptops, servers, terminals, thin clients and smart phones that are centrally supported. When planning began for the merger, the new entity was initially referred to as the Northern Region Shared Services Organisation. To comment on this article, please email the editor. Follow CIO on Twitter @cio_nz Facebook LinkedIn Sign up to receive CIO newsletters. Click here to subscribe to CIO. Related content opinion Website spoofing: risks, threats, and mitigation strategies for CIOs In this article, we take a look at how CIOs can tackle website spoofing attacks and the best ways to prevent them. By Yash Mehta Dec 01, 2023 5 mins CIO Cyberattacks Security brandpost Sponsored by Catchpoint Systems Inc. Gain full visibility across the Internet Stack with IPM (Internet Performance Monitoring) Today’s IT systems have more points of failure than ever before. Internet Performance Monitoring provides visibility over external networks and services to mitigate outages. By Neal Weinberg Dec 01, 2023 3 mins IT Operations brandpost Sponsored by Zscaler How customers can save money during periods of economic uncertainty Now is the time to overcome the challenges of perimeter-based architectures and reduce costs with zero trust. By Zscaler Dec 01, 2023 4 mins Security feature LexisNexis rises to the generative AI challenge With generative AI, the legal information services giant faces its most formidable disruptor yet. That’s why CTO Jeff Reihl is embracing and enhancing the technology swiftly to keep in front of the competition. By Paula Rooney Dec 01, 2023 6 mins Generative AI Digital Transformation Cloud Computing Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe