Tuesday 18 June
Plenary Session: 9:00 am to 10:30 am
Keynote presentation from Dr Steve Hodgkinson (Government Practice Director, OVUM)
Steve is Research Director for Ovum’s IT research and advisory business in the Asia Pacific region. He authors research reports and advises Ovum’s government clients on a range of ICT strategy, purchasing and management decisions.
The major focus of his research work is on leading edge thinking and practice about the use and management of ICT in the public sector. He covers the evolution of the CIO role and ICT strategy, shared services, cloud computing, e-government and smart cities.
He aims to provide practical guidance for executive decision makers by explaining the relevance and impact of technology trends and developments. Steve is regularly asked to chair and present at industry conferences and events around the world on ICT trends and issues. He sits on advisory committees for the NSW State Government in Sydney and Swinburne University in Melbourne.
Prior to joining Ovum he was the Deputy CIO and Director eGovernment Strategy & Policy for the Victorian State government in Melbourne. Steve was responsible for eGovernment and IT strategy across the State Government’s departments and agencies for 5 years. Prior to this he founded and sold an e-commerce company, movinghome.com.au, and worked in a range of executive and consulting roles in the government and utility sectors in Europe and Australasia.
Steve has a doctorate in Management Studies from the University of Oxford and a first class honours degree from the University of Otago in New Zealand. His doctorate was focused on the role of CIO functions in large multi-business organizations.
Plenary Session: 11:00 am to 12:00 noon
The all-of-government “cloud first” approach
Presenters: Lynda Kamstra (Programme Manager, DIA) and Alan Bell (Principal Policy Analyst, DIA)
In August 2012 Cabinet announced the adoption of an all-of-government “cloud first" approach to be led by the Department of Internal Affairs.
Programme Manager Lynda Kamstra will provide an update on the initiative, including developments in the Office Productivity as a Service (OPaaS) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) procurement processes, as well as a possible catalogue of cloud services for government agencies.
The Government is committed to continuously raising its security and privacy standards across the entire public sector. DIA Principal Policy Analyst Alan Bell has been working with a cross-agency group to develop an ICT systems assurance framework. He will speak about the core elements of ICT system assurance
Breakout Sessions: 1:00 to 2:30 pm
Presenters: Steve Milligan (Intergen), Neil McCrae (NZ Police) and Dr Mark Rees (Microsoft)
The presentation will be delivered from three organisations, Microsoft, Intergen and New Zealand Police, showing the evolution of a social media monitoring product, Signal, developed to support emergency management and public safety agencies in the incident planning, response and recovery phases.
Cloud Services - The presentation will take the attendees on a journey from the inception of Azure (Microsoft) to the development and the azure hosted product, Signal (Intergen) to the operational deployment of the product and how its supporting the efforts of the emergency services throughout New Zealand (New Zealand Police)
Collaboration - Signal was developed collaboratively between Intergen and New Zealand Police to meet requirements for the management of the 2011 Rugby World Cup. Following this event Intergen have turned the working concept into a globally scaleable product and continue to work with New Zealand Police to enhance its capabilities. Furthermore due to its cloud based nature Signal can be used by agencies collaboratively internally and externally at multiple levels of controlled permission.
Show me the Monet, Implementing a Workforce Management Cloud Solution within DIA’s Customer Contact Centre
Presenter: John Russell-Hodge
A project to improve a variety of operational support systems within DIA’s Customer Services has implemented, as its first stage, a US-based cloud solution (Monet). This is a work force management tool within DIA’s award winning Contact Centre used for matching call history with staffing capability/capacity to provide forecasts and workable rosters for contact centre agents.
The theme of the presentation will be what happens when the cloud hits the road running…
- The Government Cloud context, using a mind map to present the NZ Government Cloud topography
- What are the particular challenges when implementing cloud
- Lessons for sourcing a cloud solution
- Cloud solution and established SDLC's – what needs to give and what can’t
- Leveraging cloud solutions: what are the opportunities and benefits that can be gained by other agencies
Whilst not part of the “Cloud Programme” the project is aligned with, and reflects, DIA and NZ Government Cloud principles.
http://www.govis.org.nz/Portals/0/GOVIS2013%20by%20Sigurd%20Magnusson.pdf
Presenter: Sigurd Magnusson (SilverStripe)
- A high-altitude summary of the newly announced government common web platform
- How the new platform fosters cross-agency collaboration and utilised the cloud
- Overview of one or more website migration projects
- Benefits and challenges discovered, both business and technical
Cloud delivers census
Presenters: Sarah Minson, Mark Scambary and Christian Petters (Statistics NZ)
The 2013 Census is the single largest activity undertaken by a government department this year, with one third of the population expected to complete their forms online. To provide the required levels of reliability and scalability Statistics New Zealand has made use of All of Government Infrastructure as a Service. This presentation will share how easy it is to use cloud services, the advantages to us from a cost benefit and operational perspective, and the lessons learnt from our collaboration across multiple organisations.
All of Government services are a key initiative by Government to achieve efficiency across the public sector. Statistics New Zealand is also focused on delivering our services more efficiently as part of our ten year transformation programme. In this presentation we will share our journey towards both of those goals through using All of Government cloud services. A common theme for early adopters has been the migration of existing implementations across to an All of Government contractual model. In contrast, Statistics New Zealand has chosen to lead the organisation’s move into All of Government services with a large high profile project. In collaboration with our providers we delivered a highly available and highly scalable system from initial investigation, though planning, implementation, testing, commissioning, and eventual decommissioning, all within the time span of 18 months. Our experience has provided us with the confidence in our own abilities to make increasing use of Infrastructure as a Service, and our story will help others understand the steps required to do the same.
http://www.govis.org.nz/Portals/0/GOVIS2013%20by%20John%20Baddiley.pdf
Presenter: John Baddiley (Davanti Consulting)
As Government agencies move more applications and services into the cloud, a common question that arises is "how do I tell if the cloud solution is right for us?". In contrast with the private sector, Government agencies have a myriad of standards, regulations and mandates that must be complied with. This presentation will discuss an objective, pragmatic, repeatable process that has been used in a number of agencies.
The Government has set a clear direction for the increased use of cloud services across the public sector. However, traditional IT delivery within the public sector has often been focused on aspects such as information security (as encapsulated by SIGS and the NZISM), records management etc. In many cases, cloud service providers do not have a New Zealand-specific application set, which would appear to preclude their use. In addition, aspects such as data sovereignty are prominent in discussions about cloud services. This presentation looks at many of the challenges and "common roadblocks" associated with the use of cloud services, and introduces a straight-forward approach to addressing them.
Presenters: Clint Van Marrewijk and Breccan McLeod-Lundy (Thundermaps)
In this session Thundermaps will demonstrate how the high risk appetite of start-ups can balance the low risk appetite of government to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.
The adoption of cloud based solutions “from the bottom up”, can reduce risk for government and can radically reduce costs for government.
A case study of agile development:
- Close-up and personal collaboration with on-the-ground local government employees.
- Embracing Agile development techniques, to create a geo-data collection and response tool with broad appeal, while minimizing risk and costs to government clients.
- Insight into the crazy early days of a start-up product. Tools and methods used.
- Lessons learnt.
We will present practical ways to encourage agile collaboration between government and outside developers, in order to reduce risk and especially to reduce costs for government. We will focus on the power of the cloud to shift risk away from the risk adverse, and enable on-the-ground employees to fix their own problems.
http://www.govis.org.nz/Portals/0/GOVIS2013%20by%20John%20Martin.pdf
Presenter: John Martin (IBM)
With an emphasis on visibility, control and automation, it is critical that cloud security solutions help meet regulatory compliance, detect and defend against the latest threats, delivering a robust, security-rich cloud tuned to your specific needs. Cloud computing is transforming the way we think about IT. By treating IT as a true service, users can rapidly access the applications, business processes and infrastructure they need—resulting in greater operational efficiencies and lower costs than with many traditional IT deployments.
As with any new technology, cyber security and privacy is often seen as a major inhibitor to adoption. IT departments are concerned with reduced visibility into cloud data centres, less control over security policies, new threats facing shared environments and the complexity of demonstrating compliance and adherence to governance requirements. These concerns are especially magnified in the public sector. As long as these concerns persist in the minds of those considering cloud, security and privacy issues will continue to hamper broad cloud adoption.
Cloud security can be improved for business environments, if it is designed into the underlying infrastructure, with layered defenses to protect workloads from attacks. Users also need solutions that can provide visibility into their overall security posture. It is important to understand the unique challenges that cloud introduces, while at the same time ensuring that the overall cloud security strategy can be integrated with existing IT security policies and procedures.
Presenter: Steven Heath (Government ICT Supply Management Office, Department of Internal Affairs)
NZ Government is committed to improve its management of information especially around privacy, security and risk management. A single panel of suppliers is proposed to enable agencies to access relevant services. Steven will discuss how agencies engage services from the panel of suppliers.
Making data findable and accessible in the cloud
Presenter: Robert Young (Pingar Ltd)
New Zealand’s Pingar has developed and distributes highly innovative new technology founded on NLP (natural language processing) with capabilities delivered via an API (application programming interface) as a 'bolt on' to various applications. One of the most popular applications is the augmentation of Microsoft’s market leader SharePoint, also other leading cloud based custom apps, and business process management systems.
Pingar enables the reading of unstructured text and delivers the extraction in context of entities including keywords, custom entities, addresses, people, taxonomy terms, and others. This in turn allows for auto search refiners, business intelligence, auto classification, and fuel for workflows.
End users no longer have to manually enter metadata when they save documents so they are happy, the data management team don’t have to try and tag docs during migration either. The outcome is comprehensive, consistent and accurate metadata on all documents in the enterprise. In turn this allows the browsing of unstructured data either by specific entity or by subject matter or a combination of both, plus a list of analytical options that previously were unavailable.
Throughout Governments and both small and large businesses there is a desire for better search and outcomes from several platforms and Pingar is a new New Zealand solution that can deliver dramatic improvements; adding value to investments already made as a platform agnostic add-on via an API.
Pingar has worked closely with Microsoft on their SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 platforms as they understand the benefits Pingar can bring to the cloud environment. Behind security and scalability the number three question on most lists of why more cloud is not utilised today is around control and recall. This presentation demonstrates how the above cloud-based technologies can add the ability to organise and retrieve specific information with minimised user input.
Afternoon plenary Session: 3:00 to 4:30 pm
Panel Forum “Of course the Cloud is the answer”
Panelists: Dr Steve Hodgkinson (Ovum), Alison Holt (Longitude 174), Simon Rae (Office of the Privacy Commissioner) and Alan Bell (DIA)
Each panelist will deliver a short presentation that outlines their perception of cloud. The session will then be opened up for questions from the floor