New Zealand Digital Manifesto
Many people (myself included) have long argued that New Zealand needs a national digital strategy given the ever increasing role technology is playing in NZ’s export market.
“The IT services sector makes a significant contribution to our economy. In 2016, more than 11,000 IT firms, employed 29,700 people and contributed $3.6 billion dollars to New Zealand’s GDP" according to economic development minister Simon Bridges.
Rod Drury has long been an advocate of the creation of a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) role for New Zealand. I agree that focused technology leadership is required to accelerate progress but I’m not convinced whether it should be one person or a group of experts in various fields (AI, VR/AR, cloud etc.) given the speed & breadth at which technology is growing.
The current Government CIO (based out of the Department of Internal Affairs) has had a very agency-centric focus, working with government departments on lifting their ICT capabilities. It would be fair to say the current GCIO has focused on procurement and cost savings (mostly cost avoidance) whereas what we are talking about here is a focus on forward strategy and accelerating growth in both the private and public sector.
I propose that no matter what structure we adopt we will need is a New Zealand Digital Manifesto (working title) to provide everyone with an anchoring plan to set the direction of travel, inform where we put our resources/efforts and how we measure progress. It’s an idea I started working on a few months ago - and got input from a bunch of people at the time - but was overtaken by other events.
With the new government coming in, and its commitment to ICT growth, now is the ideal time to pick up the Manifesto and see it through to forming a complete plan for NZ Inc.
You can find a working draft of the NZ Digital Manifesto here -> http://zawilski.co.nz/nz-digital-manifesto
I’d love to hear your views on the idea and how we could take this forward to see it through to delivering a national ICT plan to accelerate the growth of New Zealand’s ICT sector and exports.