Chris Buxton presents on Statistics New Zealand's IT recovery journey

Nearly every organisation is somewhere on their cloud journey - at Equinox IT we spend a lot of time helping organisations to decide how rapidly they can safely transition their systems. While there are technical constraints, mostly these are conversations about the risk appetite of the organisation, and what rate of change both users and IT staff are able to cope with. Many organisations associate their current technologies, structures and operating models with low-risk and perceive rapid change as increasing risk - when in reality not changing fast enough can put them at greater risk.

So what can we learn from an organisation where a momentous event caused them to suddenly accelerate their pace of change? How did the stakeholders, users, IT staff and vendors engage and react? Where did the organisation end up? What would they do differently?

We were grateful to have Chris Buxton, Statistics New Zealand Chief Digital Officer, present to our clients and our people at Equinox IT on 22 August 2017. In a presentation entitled 'The Stats NZ Recovery Journey' Chris presented on Statistics New Zealand's IT response to the November earthquake that saw them displaced from their Wellington building.

He walked through:

• The work that Statistics New Zealand had done in putting together building blocks for a more mobile workforce, leveraging cloud and working towards both 'IT as a Service' and 'Building as a Service'
• How this planning and preparation work had enabled Statistics New Zealand to quickly recover from the effects of the November 2016 earthquake – and how they recovered to a position that was fundamentally better than where they had been prior to the earthquake
• Confirmation that if he was required to make the same transition again without the incident of the earthquake he would still have moved as fast.

Many thanks to Chris for making the time to deliver the presentation and to all those who attended.

Equinox IT will be running future events on topics we see as valuable and of interest to our clients.

Graham Pohl is a Principal Consultant specialising in strategy and architecture, based in Equinox IT's Wellington office. See Graham's profile...

Some of the photos from the event and presentation...