娇色导航

Cathy O'Sullivan?

Welcome to 娇色导航leadership Live New Zealand. I'm Cathy O'Sullivan, Editorial Director for Foundry's Enterprise and Channel brands in Australia and New Zealand. On today's episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Steve James who is the General Manager of Technology at Woolworths New Zealand.

Kia ora Steve, thanks for being with us today. ? Steve James?

It's an absolute pleasure to be here. ? Cathy O'Sullivan? ?Excellent, excellent.

Look, you are one of our CIO50 alumni, and we've caught up a number of times. But for those who don't know you, can you tell us a little bit about your career to date how you got your start in IT.

And I guess what have been some of your career milestones? ? Steve James? Yeah, absolutely.

Well, my first job was a forklift driver, because I wanted to leave school early.

But I was lucky to kind of fall into technology, it was something I had been interested in, after electrocuting myself with a screwdriver in the back of a prototype computer when I was very young.

But it did, it did spark an interest for me in technology, like my first technology role was working for an ISP on helpdesk.

But you know, moving through different types of roles, project management, service delivery types, things, I really fell in love with the strategy and the people leadership, and more particularly recently, I have a real passion for bringing people into the industry.

And also just seeing them light up and become fired up about the careers and technology and helping them be who they are at work, you know, and what genuinely now, milestones I've really enjoyed working.

Some of the key places I loved? - Les Mills International, I was there a couple of roles before this, and, you know, working in a really fast-paced the fitness industry, world leader and fitness, and it was awesome to be in a very fast paced, almost startup like company, and, you know, we, we did a huge cloud migration, we, we managed to open up overseas offices, and basically the time it took to stand up an internet connection, and it was we were just innovating, innovating, innovating.

But you know, partner that was coming here into Woolworths and you know, hugely complex, and I guess the milestone for me here, and what I'm really proud of is the way we've been able to partner with our colleagues across at Woolworths Group and really get absolute best outcomes for our customers.

And it has been a bit of a journey to build those relationships and really turn some of those roadblocks into opportunities for us as a team. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

And awesome that you started out as a forklift driver because of course, I'm sure that at some of your your end users in the organisation, you look at them as well when it comes to technology.

So look, Woolworths and more recently, the Countdown brand are very well known to Kiwis, but for those who aren't aware of Woolworths do, Steve, can you give us a bit of an overview of the organisation? You know, its purpose and what you and the team look after there?

? Steve James? Absolutely.

So, um, you know, at our heart Woolworths is a grocer. So we're putting food on the table for people that need it. We're a large organisation, we have slightly over 22,000 employees.

We have around 190 stores right from the top of the North Island to the bottom of the South. Those are Woolworths and also Countdown stores at the moment as we're going through a rebrand. A very complex supply chain system with distribution centres throughout the country as well.

Meat production factory; we have a digital media business, we have a wholesale business as well. We have our Everyday Rewards programme, which is hopefully going to build into New Zealand's most loved loyalty programme. My team look after the technology that basically drives the stores.

So your point-of-sale, the networks in store, we provide the technology to the digital media company that are displaying their signage, the technology that runs our forklift systems, our picking systems, that sort of thing.

We supply the underlying platforms for the automated picking facilities we have, we have a robotic system that's picking out groceries that get delivered out to people.

So we're really at that foundational aspect of anything you can think of that drives a very large complex grocery retailer or fast moving consumer goods; my team is there somewhere.

Now the key for us being able to stay pretty lean in New Zealand but still service such a large complex system as we utilise a lot of technology that is actually housed in our Australian head office.

And again, like I said that the magic for us is how we partner to get really good outcomes for them. So, the technology team is pretty full service ranging from helpdesk end user compute through to front end developer, architect that type of stuff as well. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So then just broadening out on that - and you touched on some of the things that you and the team look after there - what have been some of the key achievements and how is that digitalization journey tracking? ? Steve James? Yeah.

Look, I know a lot of people talk about this, but during COVID was one of my proudest moments with my team. You know, that was a very unusual, unprecedented was the word we all used at the time situation there.

And I don't know if people remember, but, you know, we were a essential worker, so people still needed to go into the supermarket, we still needed some of us to go into the office. But we're also faced with some really unique challenges, and crazy uncertain times.

And one of those things is, was we had certain people who could absolutely not leave their homes because they might have had poor health, they maybe had to stay isolated so they didn't catch COVID because it would be life threatening.

And we didn't have a way of giving them the priority to our delivery slots with online shopping.

And the team -? across from our infrastructure teams through to our digital team - within about two to three weeks, we had stood up this virtual customer call centre on actually Zoom technology, because it's the only thing we could, were ringing around everyone, cutting through all the red tape, it was you know, very, very quick.

And we managed to get this call centre up staffed by volunteers, and in such a short amount of time, and it made such a big difference to those people that really needed it, and I was really proud of the team to just go, we basically said, 'Look, we just don't really care how you do this, you've got to get it done, go away and make it happen'.

And you know, crazy whiteboard sessions, people just making decisions, they're front and centre. Very, very cool. I think one of the other big things, you know, on a base level, we've we've done a huge process of moving things up into the cloud, as everyone's most people have.

That's been really successful for us. Our response - the other big one -? the response to Cyclone Gabrielle was I mean, it was a heartbreaking time, I was actually overseas in the UK working remotely while I was with family.

And I couldn't be here during, you know, what was probably one of the most serious weather events, certainly of my lifetime. And we had several communities that were completely cut off. So no roads, our phone, water.

And we had to get our stores up and running as quickly as possible. I mean that the food in those stores was just sitting there, we couldn't get the stores open, we couldn't sell that stuff.

And we had people in that community to say 'we need to get this food out there'.

And the team came up with this really creative solution and working with our partner Spark to get a satellite in there, get the store systems communicating through the satellite, with on, you know, generators generating that power, and we managed to get those stores back up and running, getting the stores back up and running the cases and the magic, but we were able to service communities and give them what they needed.

And then finally get that food and the team, you know, operated quickly, with urgency. I was not present, I was sort of trying to coordinate things from afar. And it was it was a really proud moment. Our digitization journey as well. We're pretty far through.

So we have a world-leading e-comm service for our groceries. Last week, the penetration was up near 16%, which is world class.

And we do have plans to replatform to something a bit more modern, that will make it a bit more efficient and allow us to utilise some of the new technologies coming down the pipeline, because some of those systems are a little dated.

But we really have a view on how can we optimise optimise, optimise with technology, make? the customer experience better in the store and online. And I think we're lucky to have again, our colleagues at [Woolworths] Group often ideating and putting in a lot of investment there.

And we can pick and choose the things gonna work for New Zealand customers as well. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So just on that, then, you know, how do you ensure that that tech strategy aligns with the overall mission and goals of the organisation? What are you looking at when it comes to your IT initiatives and ensuring it lines up with your business strategy? ? Steve James?

All that, for us is a real mindset shift. So technologists generally really love technology, that's why they're in the game. They love to talk about technology, and they end up talking about things that no one understands.

So what we've worked really, really hard to do is that mindset that our technology strategy lives in service of our business strategy. So what that means for us is a couple of things.

When we're talking about the work that we do, we've worked really hard for the team to not talk about widgets: 'I built the server', 'I created this network', 'I made this app', but we talk about the value it's created for the business.

It's a it's a small language shift.

But for a technologist, it makes us think about, 'okay, what is the tangible outcome for our users, for our customers, for our business here?' which not only then helps you tie into what the high-level business strategy is, it gives you a real sense of connection to us being grocers, putting food on the table, helping those who can't get out of the house.

So it really builds a very close connection to having meaning at work. I mean, we do we do use tools, like objectives, key results, okay, as we're in quarterly planning cycles, we're often in sprint cycles, even in some of our infrastructure teams who work in sprint cycles.

And along with that, using all that good stuff like retros, and things like that, to make sure that we're we're constantly pivoting back to be supporting that business strategy.

And so we do create a tech strategy, but we don't create it until we have what the business is wanting to do.

We keep track of tech, we have a technology radar that's looking at the different technologies on the fringe that will be used soon that are being used in the company. So we're definitely matching it up with a technology roadmap lens.

But what's more important to me, because I will hire people who are wildly creative technologists. But what's more important is that they learn to understand the wider business context. So too often I've been in companies, where it's technology and business.

And I, I seek to break that wherever possible, because we are just the business, we are Woolworths, whether we're in Australia and New Zealand, wherever, we are Woolworths, we are grocers, we're here to put food on the table.

Or as I'm looking at pure on a sign here, make Kiwis lives a little bit of every day. That's that's actually our purpose not to build technology.

So once the team understands that once they truly deeply understand our, our market economic context, what the businesses are attempting to do, what customers are wanting, or what they're struggling with, when we are asked to provide solutions or provide supporting platforms, we can deliver better outcomes and that are uniquely tailored to get the things that customers and the business want rather than 'I build this because it's easy for me as a technologist' or 'I build this because it's interesting to me as a technologist'.

And it's like I said, it's been a journey.

But it allows us to storytel and allows us to not just show up on a 50-page presentation that sends everyone to sleep, but actually tell the story of how we made a Kiwi's life better each day, how we delivered food to someone table, how we got a store back up and running during the worst weather event of living memory, you know, that that's the magic for me.

And it means you're able to articulate your value to your business stakeholders to your executive, you're able to keep your team heavily engaged, they want to come to work because they know why they're there.

And yet really important to me that we keep that connection tightly between the tech and what the business outcome is. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So look, there is a lot of noise at the moment around things like AI. I mean, is there any? Well it's not that new. But is there any kind of emerging tech that you are quite excited about? And you do see value in for your organisation?

? Steve James?

Yeah, yeah, I do. I mean, I, I love people but I am a technologist at heart. I love playing around with different tech at home. And I think if you talk to my team, I've got a little gaming handheld.

There'll be like you spend more time like loading different operating systems and playing with settings and you do actually playing games. I just I love that sort of stuff. So what am I getting excited about?

A lot and rather than first focus on a specific technology, anything that makes our team safer is a key thing for me creative ways of making our team safer in store.

We're facing these very, very high levels of aggression, physical violence, verbal abuse, and any creative way that we can use computer vision or electronic alarming systems or something that is not intrusive to anyone's privacy, but does give us the ability to pick up when behaviours getting out of hand somewhere.

I love all those sorts of things. And we do have some things in the works. I can't really talk about them today, but you will see some of our team at the moment wearing body cams. It's a very simple technology.

It's not new, funky technology, but it's creating I think a real safe platform for them, if someone kicks off at them in a store, and the light turns on on the video camera, often that person winds back.

So I love simple things like that, that may be not new, but are really making a tangible difference to the team. Anything that reduces toil or that boring, unnecessary repetitive work.

So that is where I think, some of the new large language models or the large action models or yep, AI, I had to throw AI in there. So if anyone's doing bingo, they can cross that off the list.

There is real opportunity, like real tangible opportunities for us in that space. Have we dived into it with both feet? No, not yet. Are there experiments right across our business on seeing what impact it can have? Absolutely, throughout the business.

It's something that I'm using every day, just on simple ways of helping tightening up my writing, creating images and slide decks for work. Within our business,? we're a Google shop, so we have the Gemini large language model attached to our email and documents.

And you're finding more and more people using it every day, we're seeing those uses numbers really go through the roof. Why do I think that's exciting?

Because I think it democratises access to being a good person at work, to creative writing that maybe someone can't do because they're either challenged with their writing skills, or they have a condition that means they can't read or write tha well, this democratises that.

And as we get to a point where you can just talk naturally, like you and I are talking, and get a response that's useful and valuable to you. I think we're going to see more and more of that come to life. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Yeah, it's it's fascinating, isn't it? All this emerging tech that we have. But of course, you know, you mentioned that you have a lean team. And of course, you I'm sure have a lot of legacy tech that you and the team also have to look after.

So how do you balance that then, that need for cutting edge technology with, you know, maintaining existing IT infrastructure and systems? ? Steve James? Yep.

So, you know, we're a complex grocer. So there was a lot of real core 101? base tech. We are very lucky that over the last five years, our group has focused really hard on moving to modernising our platforms.

Within our New Zealand business, we have only a small handful of services that either aren't up in the cloud and heavily resilient.

But we do you know, we have 180 stores, 190 stores throughout the country, DCS with, you know, 1000s of access points, 1000s of switches, you know, there's there's a big volume.

We're lucky that we we invest a large amount of my capital spend every year, there's an life cycling old equipment, we have a very, very rigid policy, once it hits end of life, we cycle it as soon as we can, the following year, we hit tight metrics, tracking the risk associated with leaving certain tech in.

And we can demonstrate tangible value to the business by having that large investment. So I think 'how do we handle that?' We show the value of investing to modernise those platforms.

For example, you know, we're investing large sums of money to replace that old equipment every year that is there as part of our capital spend for the last three years.

And we can show that 'Stop Trade Events', we call them, so anytime a distribution centre or store cannot serve as customers, the clock starts ticking. So five years ago, that was 600 hours a year, so almost two hours a day, you'd have a store that couldn't trade.

Now, this year, it's 40 hours a year. So there's almost never a 'stop trade' incident. And that is, we can directly correlate that with the time we started replacing old systems to now. And that, you know, being able to tell that story is really important.

So that's that's how we articulate again, we use storytelling rather than 'you must upgrade your systems', we show the tangible value. And then I think the other thing that we're starting to move to as as technology changes, is we're introducing platforms that are easy to maintain.

So for example, if we are going to introduce new networking systems, is there a cloud dashboard that we can manage everything from one place with, say software defined networking? And that means we don't need large exponentially large systems as we scale or people teams as we scale.

And you can just have a core set of people who can keep eyes on glass and look at those things, you know, from an office or from wherever hybrid teams across the Tasman Yeah, that's probably that. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So another fundamental part of keeping you up and running is, of course, ensuring that your systems are secure.

So tell us a bit about your approach to cybersecurity, and how do you ensure the security and privacy of all that data that you have in your, in your systems there at Woolworths? ? Steve James?

Yeah, we're lucky to have a really mature cyber practice across that group. So that's housed with our CISO, across Australia.

But we have a really, really good, proactive, rich dialogue with him on how to approach this stuff, we have great ways of monitoring the status of where we're at with our risk, we regularly talk about risk, we are transparent, where there are risks.

So we don't have a culture of keep it hidden. Because you don't want anyone to know, we actually lean right into going actually, it's better you say how bad it is, because then we can focus the investment on the important stuff.

We've recently been through a programme where we've had gone through all our systems again, audited them and says, 'Where are they on these certain metrics', so that we know and everyone's fessed up and said, 'Yep, this one's not great'. 'This one was great', 'this one's not great'.

And now we know where to funnel that money rather than keeping it hidden. So that's one of the techniques we use, we have some great tooling that automate some of the things.

So regular pen tests are happening with some tooling we have, code is scanned as it's committed, our API's are scanned with a special layer that sort of make sure we're not releasing any personal data that shouldn't be released.

And ultimately, I think we'd like to move to that zero trust environment where any laptop can connect with a layer in between, because after that layer, it's protected rather than having to make sure you've got just one type of laptop, one type of firewall, you know, we want to make it easy for for our team.

And so, add in that zero trust layer. Yeah, and look, we have some some good processes. So we are, like I said, we regularly talking about it, we have a lot of visibility of things that are happening real time, I think that's really important.

So that we can understand the trends of what's happening. So certain threats will evolve. And as they evolve, we find new things that we hadn't realised would be vulnerabilities in our systems. And so we can focus funds in there.

But that, that real time, if view of things with things like ExtraHop and CrowdStrike, that can give us that 'oh, look, we can see people nibbling away at the edge of the network with this type of new thing we've not seen before', this type of behaviour that might not be registered in the system as a cybersecurity threat, but it's very suspect behaviour.

And then we can go and investigate that isolate those machines. So look, I feel we're in a good place. Nothing's perfect, touch wood everywhere. But again, I really think the key thing is that you talk about it, that you are honest and transparent.

Because I have worked at places where the culture is 'Don't, Don't talk, don't tell whatever it is, you know, let's keep it a secret.

And we'll try and fix it on the side.' But either you get caught short when an event happens and someone will say, 'Why did you not make us aware of this risk.' Or you can't secure the funding that you need to secure your perimeter or to secure your code.

For us, it's been very successful. And again, we have that culture of a lot of support from our senior management. So if you do come and talk to them, they say, 'How's this looking?' You go 'Not great.' Oh, okay. That makes me uncomfortable.

Do you have a plan?' 'Yes, we have a plan.' 'Do you need help with it?' 'Yes, I need help with it'. 'Okay. We'll come back to you with how that's going.' So yeah, it's a good cultural thing for us as well. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Yeah, fundamental to have that security culture across the organisation, as he said. And so when it comes to technology partners, then what do you look for Steve, when you're going out to market? What what does a good partnership look like from your point of view? ? Steve James?

Yeah, we're huge and sometimes can be a little bit hard to work with. Not everyone loves us. Let's get that out of the way. Some, some partners love working with us some don't. But look, we what I want is a real partner.

I want someone who's going to come into my organisation and be my organisation. They bring their expertise, but again, almost like I was saying about my team that they understand deeply our business strategy. We don't hide that from them.

They're involved in the quarterly planning, they're involved in the sprint cycle, that type of stuff. They're not just coming in and exiting the business, because with that context, they can provide a much richer service to us.

We have a really, really tight governance process on partners, which sounds really boring, but it's incredibly successful.

So and look, if you talk to Spark - and I can say that because I think they're gonna say the same thing - they one of our key partners in New Zealand, and they are in this process.

And what it allows us to do is we have an agreement with them, a master services agreement. We have a team of people who go through that, and you know, we legally agree. And then we have a group of people that go 'Cool.

So what does that mean for the business?' And how will that partner prove to us they're meeting their commitments in that agreement.

We meet monthly, we talk about those things, everything's on the table, every six months, they get a chance to meet with our executive team, talk to the executive about how they're going, but what extra they could bring into the business.

And because it's on this repetitive cycle, everything is on the table.

So there's none of this passive aggressive, the passive aggressive BS, I would say, that can sometimes come into our vendor relationships or partner relationships where people don't feel they can be upfront, or they just want to be aggressive and thump the table.

Partners that want to work with us in that manner, are incredibly successful here and have a good tenure.

And I have learned that that being very clear, and being very honest, and actually using your things like your master services agreement to your advantage, rather than just a document that goes into a drawer is incredibly beneficial for both parties. Because you both know where you stand.

I do love you know, some of the other partners who have ideating with us. And because of our scale, they're willing to take risks on us give some new tech that maybe they maybe haven't released.

And we love working with partners who can, again, understand their business and go, 'Look, we've got this idea for you. How about your try this thing out?' Yeah. So anyone that understands that context is going to be really successful with us. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So switching gears a little bit. What's your approach, then when it comes to getting the best out of your own team? How are you creating that environment that really helps people thrive? ? Steve James? Yeah.

I actually spoke about this a little bit last week. And I was trying to decide what things I wanted to talk about. And I think what I said last week is probably where my head's at the moment. So there's, there's a few key things.

As a leader, and my leaders who are with me, and my team, is learning to listen and not talk so much. I am a talker, as you're probably working out from today. I love talking. I love rich conversation. But I have had to learn to dial that back.

So maybe my desire to talk is a 10.

And what happens if I dial it back to a six and actually spend time listening, eyeballing people, trying to find the quiet person in the room, trying to find that diverse opinion that I don't like, you know, and trying to hear gold in that and I think that's really important to bring the best out in your team.

It helps them feel safe to speak. It does enrich your decision making process. Because you get to hear the thoughts that aren't just yours. You don't just have sycophants who are saying 'yes, yes, yes, Steve'.

The other thing that's really important for my team is making sure that my leaders can actually lead. Again, as technologists we're a lot guilty of putting in a really great technologist into a leadership position, and then going, 'Why are you not leading properly?

Why is your team engagement really low?' Because we aim to teach people to lead and it's a skill, that's a real skill. And people who lead well get exponentially better results than people who just kind of fumble along.

So teaching your people to lead, having proper leadership programmes, and then also helping your team understand how to follow, how to follow a good leader, how to help them make good decisions, how to work collaboratively together, rather than just the great mighty leader who sits at the top making all the decisions.

You know, actually, the people in the team feeling empowered to say 'I have a part in this, the success of this team'. My other big one is keeping away from that victim mentality. So seeing obstacles as opportunities.

And I think we've all been there, you know, you're in a tough position. And you're going 'We can't do this because of that. We can't do it.

Oh, no, that's never going to work.' And I have a great team of people who support me to sort of turn that around and say that roadblock is actually an opportunity. So yeah, look, I'm keeping away from that victim mentality is a key one for me.

So often, we can see obstacles and just go, 'we could never gonna do this, we're never going to succeed'. And in your head too turning those into opportunity discussions and go 'what would need to be true for us to be successful here?' It's really important.

And if you can teach your team to do that with you, when they're feeling like they're stuck, you can help them but when you're feeling like stuck, you're getting the best out of your team as well. And look the big one for me.

And I think it's really, really important is that you speak with honesty, clarity and authenticity. Now, if you haven't read Radical Candor, you should. I love that mentality. It's something that I learned the hard way on my leadership journey.

And one of the key things I talked about in that book is this thing called ruinous empathy, where you try and be so nice to people and you think you're helping them, but you're just not being honest with them.

And you're not really saying, 'actually, there's something here we need to talk about, this might be uncomfortable, but let's deal with that'. And, for me, being honest, being authentic, and just being really clear with what you're saying, your team makes their life so much easier.

And it's actually what they want, even if that message is hard. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So another factor when it comes to helping your team thrive is having a diverse team, of course, so And how did you think we can attract more people from different backgrounds to consider IT as a career?

Are there any kind of practical things that you've done or looked at to make sure we have those minds of all kinds and technology? ? Steve James?

Yeah, we are doing some things. But before I answer that part, I think the key thing is, you have to turn this into something you will actually do rather than just talk about doing.

Because I have many people in the industry around me -? awesome people -? and they go, 'we really need to create a diverse team'. When they start trying to create a diverse team, they realise it's quite hard in some areas where that's really underrepresented. And then it stops.

And there has to be this commitment to actually push through and actually make a difference because you believe it's the right thing, not just because you have to tick a box via DEI matrix or whatever it's going to be.

So for me, having a rich team with diverse thinking, not just gender, ethnicity, whatever it's going to be, and with diverse thinking makes me a better leader. And we get better outcomes. Because I don't want carbon copies of me.

We do have a real challenge in our tech industry, Pasifika and Māori are heavily under represented. We have a great diverse team here in the tech space, but Pasifika and Māori are heavily underrepresented. So what we're doing practically is trying to go after that in my team.

So we're working with partners. And I think that's the best way is working with ground roots organisations who are already working these areas and forming close partnerships with them.

So you know, I met this amazing man Lee Timutimu, who, who spoke with me at a panel recently, and some of the stuff that he's involved with just kind of blew my mind. And I was looking at some of his things online.

And there's people out there doing amazing things. So connecting with them via LinkedIn, via email via conferences, very, very important.

We're also we've done some things with Mission Ready, TupuToa, Take2 - another organisation, you know well.? We're trying to get our first intern through from there and fingers crossed, that's going to happen shortly.

So being really creative and going, remembering that once upon a time it was you knocking on the door and never forgetting that, you know, now that I'm a senior leader, and I have a decent amount of industry and organisational power, not forgetting the fact that I used to knock on the door too, and go, 'How do I get into this industry?' And it's actually quite hard to come in as a junior or someone new to this industry.

Probably the final thing I'd say is, you have to make your spaces safe. So don't bring in people and then they feel incredibly awkward and unsafe in your environment.

You have to work really hard to unpack to understand what it is that makes the diverse community you're welcoming in safe in your environment. Are there biases, is there training that needs to happen? Do you need to unlearn, relearn some things?

And that might be quite challenging as well. All of those things together. I think it sounds difficult. But if you can really make a commitment to it, I think that's the important thing. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Yeah, and I love that point that remembering when you were the one knocking on the door. So that leads me nicely to ask you that, I guess what's your advice for someone who is aspiring to be a 娇色导航or in a senior IT leadership position?

? Steve James? Yeah.

You know, when I do sometimes forget what it was like coming into the industry.

And often when I'm meeting aspiring leaders or younger people who are coming in, I remember that I used to think there was a trick to becoming a tech leader or those people who got to the top, they must have learned the magic of getting there.

And that's not true. There are things, there are practical things you can do to learn - podcasts, audio books, real books, random real books. There's a lot of online communities you can go along to.

I think those are the really important things that the times I've grown most as a technologist or a leader, it's it's getting into the rhythm of listening to industry, things that are happening of going along to some of those networking events as much as some people might cringe at that, I get so much out of them.

And I think as someone who's trying to emerge into a leadership position, it's really important to see who's around them.

And the magic part of doing that is you realise they're just like you, they're not actually different from you, they're just maybe have a little bit more experience or they're skilled in something different that you're not skilled in, and like your skill that they're not skilled in.

And I think for me, there were a while there was this thought that I was an imposter. And you know, these people out there, they're so amazing, everyone's just human. And so by making human connections in the industry, you start to learn that.

I think LinkedIn is a really powerful tool. If you're, if you want to make connections, or if you want to understand what it's like to be a CIO, or you know, a senior tech leader, somewhere, a CTO, find someone on LinkedIn and message them.

And I reckon 70 to 80% of time, you're going to get a reply from someone that says, 'oh, yeah, come and have a coffee with me, I'll talk you through it, no problems'. Many of us really want to do that. And you shouldn't be afraid to do that.

Because we have these amazing tools available to us now to quickly network of people.

And look, my other big one is, have a look at yourself, if you're wanting to get into a senior leader position is it probably require a bit of personal transformation, because it's it is difficult to lead a group of people who are looking to you to help guide them through maybe tough times, and be able to understand your personal values is really important.

Being being able to act from those values, rather than just 'I want my boss to think I'm amazing', is a really key change that and if you can make that change, you really carve your own personal niche of the industry as well. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

And speaking of challenges, what what do you think are some of the main challenges facing CIOs in here in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 2024? ? Steve James? Yeah, we're in.

I think we're in that belt tightening era as the cost-of-living crunch hits. You know, you're seeing us that large retailers are closing, profits are going down in some areas. So I think that tightening of the belt is going to be a real challenge for tech leaders.

And then how do we balance that we need to make sure we keep our cost of doing business flat or reducing, while we still invest in the innovative things that are going to give you that competitive advantage as a business and really differentiate you from the other people in market.

I think the cloud has been a blessing, but it's also very easy to sprawl in and I think people are realising the costs, the ongoing costs of using stuff in the cloud. It needs discipline, as we had discipline when things were on premise as well.

So using tools to control those costs and give you visibility, I think, is a real challenge.

I think the AI stuff is is a real challenge, because people who don't - personal opinion - people who don't get on board with some of the new stuff coming down the pipe will be left behind as to and that includes people who are the incumbents, if we don't accelerate into things that are going to make our business better and easier, we'll get left behind.

Because, you know, my dream is that some of these new technologies democratise access to some of the cool thinking that we have access to with our expertise and our business. The other big thing we started talking about recently is the circular economy. So we are a trans-Tasman business.

And we form these big agreements with companies. And I would like to see how we utilise our large businesses to put money into the New Zealand economy.

Are we investing in indigenous companies, for example, that's something new that hadn't occurred to me and someone asked me the other day, why would we not invest in indigenous businesses that can put money back here?

What do you do with your e-waste as we generate these huge programmes of work to lifecycle things out? Large companies need to be really responsible with what they do with their equipment. I think that that's a challenging thing to think about.

And I think as some of the big US companies come in with the great solutions is making sure that they have a true investment in New Zealand because it's it's very easy to just give your money to someone who's going to take their money overseas.

But it's even better, maybe harder to make a tough decision and give it to a New Zealand company that's going to invest in the future of Aotearoa rather than the US economy. ? Cathy O'Sullivan? Yeah, for sure.

And I know it's something that a lot of CIOs here in New Zealand are thinking about that New Zealand Inc piece and making sure that we are benefiting New Zealand overall.

So look, finally then, Steve, what's important to you in the months ahead, hard to believe we only have half of the year left in 2024. Any exciting initiatives in the pipeline? ? Steve James?

Yeah, modernising some of our digital platforms without giving the game away is incredibly exciting for us. I'm pretty sure you can tell I love it.

Some of the new composable architecture platforms out there, just, you know, the dream is it's like Lego blocks with different systems and services you need to provide. So I'm very excited about that.

I think computer vision is taking off for us as well, being able to assess certain behaviours that we don't want in our stores. But also identifying when stock's running out on the shelf and alerting someone; really exciting. And you can do it quite easily.

It is quite challenging to do at scale. But yeah lots of people can innovate and come up with cool ideas there.

And our convenience offerings, so any technology allows us to provide food to you in a way that is more convenient, whether it's dropping it in the boot of your car, whether it's being delivered in sub 30 minutes, whatever it's going to be. That stuff's incredibly exciting.

And people are showing that they're really interested in simplifying their lives by making use of those as well. ? Cathy O'Sullivan? Wonderful.

Well, we wish you all the best with those initiatives. Steve James, General Manager of Technology at Woolworths New Zealand, thank you so much for your time today. ? Steve James?

Thanks for having me, Cathy. It's been great.