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 Eion Hall, who is the Chief Information Officer at the University of Waikato. Kia ora, Eion.

Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being with us today. ? Eion Hall?

Thank you very much. It's I'm really excited to be here. This should be great. ? Cathy O'Sullivan? Great stuff.

And great to see you again after that beautiful visit to the university a few weeks ago. And look we had a great chat at the time and you told me a bit about your career to date.

So can you share with the audience how you got your start in IT? And I guess what have been some of your career milestones to date? ? Eion Hall? Sure.

Thank you. Hey, first of all, thank you very, very much for having me here. I'm really excited about this. And thanks for coming to visit our beautiful campus. It's a little known gem. It's an absolutely amazing space here in the Waikato.

Look, I've been, I fell into IT really, by mistake. I don't know 15 years ago, 10, maybe a bit longer, I was working for Hamilton City Council.

And we had, I was there as like a general sort of business advisor, business manager for a group of council services and facilities like stadiums and libraries and event centres and parks and all these amazing community assets. And I was very fortunate to be working in there.

Anyway, they decided at Hamilton City Council that they would do a digital transformation program and and they created a steering group for the digital transformation program.

I ended up on the steering group and the program got off to a bit of an auspicious start - staggered, didn't really work -? the person who was running it was decided that the role wasn't for them.

And I remember at the time a chief executive who was Michael Redmond, who I've got a lot of time for, he said, 'Hey, would you mind if these people report to you for a bit until we figure out what to do with them?' And yeah, and so from there, we ended up you know, managing that program of work, it was quite a big program, we took a bit of time to turn it around? - 10 projects.

And my family laughed, I remember I got home not long after the day,? I said 'I got a new job, I'm managing this IT program'. And my son at the time was probably six or seven, maybe a bit older.

And he said to me, Dad, 'how can you do that you can't even use the Sky machine!' And that's literally how I fell into IT. And from there, the 娇色导航role became vacant. And I just delivered the program of work.

And my motivation for becoming a 娇色导航was more selfish at the time than anything other than that I was three quarters of the way through a program of work, that I had a pretty good plan around, and I was pretty sure we were going to get delivered.

And the last thing I wanted was someone else coming in and telling me how to do it. So I said I'll solve that problem by putting my hand up. That was my pitch, they gave me the job.

And then from there, I ended up here at the lovely University of Waikato.

One of the? -? I'm sure we'll talk about this a bit later - but one of the amazing things that I've been very fortunate with as a lot of the crew that I that I run with now, or some of the, my key people and whether they are in partners that I've worked with, or my own staff or peers, actually have been working with me since that beginning at Hamilton City Council.

So yeah, it's been a real privilege and a journey to work with that group of people over a number of years. And I think we've had some real fun along the way and achieved some pretty cool things that I'm pretty excited to share. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Wonderful and looking forward to hearing more about that. So look, as you said, you've been 娇色导航at the University of Waikato for a number of years now.

So can you tell us a little bit more about the uni, its purpose and what you and the team look after there? ? Eion Hall? Yeah, sure.

So, like you said, this is the University of Waikato. We're New Zealand's, we're about the sixth largest university in terms of size. However, we're now ranked third amongst the most of the ranking, international ranking systems that they use around our achievements around research is even higher than that.

And then just general rankings we went way higher. We punch we think pretty much above our weight. We're about 13,000 students roughly; we have three campuses. We have one here in Hamilton. We have our Tauranga campus which was opened recently.

That was an experience, I was running facilities at the time when we opened our Tauranga campus.

And yeah, so commissioning a building that had to start teaching on the first day of a semester was a was a lot of fun because every day that the building was late was one less day for commissioning.

It's not like you push out the start of the year, the students are arriving on the first day when we were ready or not. So we established all that, that was fun. We got a lovely campus over there.

It's a brand new building, beautiful views across the sea and the Mount. And it's a beautiful place. And we've also got a campus in China that we run in a partnership over there in Hangzhou. And yeah, and we also teach over there. So what are we here for?

Look, we are, we're a pretty proud university of our of our roots, particularly in computer science, we've got a really strong history in computer science. Not many people know this.

But it was the home of the internet in New Zealand; our scientists were the first people in the country to connect the Internet to NASA, it was the first at the time. So we're pretty proud of our heritage.

Some of our graduates have gone on to do things like form, lead, Google's DeepMind, those other things. So we got a pretty had a proud heritage in computer science.

And of course, we're making a play now for what we think is a really great opportunity for the country around being the third medical school. And we're really, really excited by that.

And the prospect of having the opportunity to provide more doctors into our rural and communities and particularly those that represent those populations, Māori and Pasifika and those sorts of things.

So it's a really exciting initiative that I have to get in there, because I'm really, really excited about the opportunity that provides for the country. So achievements, well we've got... university's a funny place, I think of myself more as an ISP than an IT provider.

If the university is like a town, there's any time there's about 15,000 people connected to our network. And for most of those people, they really want as a high speed internet connection that works really, really well.

So we've invested a lot of money, we've got really good partnership with Arista Networks and we've invested a lot of money on that. And we've got probably, I think, probably the best campus network in the country, if not one of our best large scale networks.

It's high speed, it's got very little latency, very, very little friction for users in terms of what they need to do to engage with it and work with it, we think. We're pretty proud of that and we've got that pretty right.

Can't say enough good things about the team at Arista - Simon and the guys - they do an amazing job. And that's probably I know, we're gonna touch on this a bit later when we talk about advice and stuff.

But when I was thinking about this on the way in here, and I really do think if I was giving advice to anybody who was in my situation, or who were thinking about coming down this role is to build really good relationships with people that sustain over time.

And if your careers grow together, and you make other people successful, and you make them successful, you grow together. And there are, there really good people in this industry. And we're really, really lucky to have them.

And I think if you search them out, and you can get past the spiel, and some of the big brands that are in front of them, it doesn't really matter too much, you can get some pretty amazing things achieved and, and I put Arista in that group.

They're a great bunch of guys. So anyway, universities are interesting. When I arrived here, we had six IT departments. Every faculty had its own little IT team. And central IT, really just we were procurement really, and we would just manage things like teaching spaces.

So it's been a pretty transformational journey. We've had to bring those six teams, we created one team. And ironically, we've ended up with some more fragmentation around the adoption of cloud and things like that.

There's some real challenges, and how do you govern cloud when you've got business ownership of applications? So we had six, everything was pretty fragmented, we had a lot of technology debt, we used to be a Google shop.

And so look over the last seven or eight years, we've invested a lot of time and effort in just cleaning up our legacy. Cleaning up a lot of our technical debt, investing in infrastructure like networks; having a really sensible data centre strategy with Spark.

I mean that was one of the few real 'win win' things that we've really got in this university, I mean not in this university...

I mean, very rarely in your career things truly 'win win' from the vendor and the partner and there's usually you know, there's always something to be gained by somebody and sometimes the real win win ones are, you know, they aren't as is as fair as they make out to be.

But I think the relationship we entered into with Spark around our data centre - where they bought our data centre - was just an enormous opportunity. It was great for them, they needed a data centre in the Waikato, we had a really good one.

We're not very good at managing them; our footprint in there was reducing. It solved the problem for them and environmentally, I mean, we're not throwing away a perfectly good data centre, right it's perfectly well, well managed.

It's it's got good infrastructure, it's it's in the right places, and it's all the equipment's there and it's been significant investment that would otherwise gone to waste. So a real 'win win' and getting out of that business, and the network and then the foundations on top of that.

We've consolidated our applications into the Oracle suite, we've now got a Microsoft platform, we've really done a pretty good job of dealing with technical debt. And we're in a really good place.

The irony for us, the biggest challenge at the moment, is the skills and the things that we've become really good at, are not necessarily the things that we now need for us to grow as to our next evolution of IT. So that's a really interesting journey for us.

Like we are really good at large transformational waterfall projects, like really, really good. We just did two last year, we moved 20,000 accounts from Microsoft...? from Google to Microsoft, including Teams and from Cisco, and SharePoint, and all of that.

And we did that in about nine months, and of which was about six weeks of actual migration, that was incredible. We moved our entire web program from, onto the new SilverStripe platform. It was an enormous project we delivered.

And in both cases, we handed back large chunks of contingency, and we did it fast. And we said we were going to do it. And we're really good at those projects now. And our big challenge is we're not... we don't have any more of those projects.

We got a really good platform over here. We're thinking about Agile, scrums, and different ways of working. And that's going to be a real challenge for us. And the biggest thing coming at us, but we're in a pretty good place. ? Cathy O'Sullivan? Great to hear.

And thank you for that; quite a lot of achievements in the last few years there at the University of Waikato. So Eion keen to understand, I guess, what's been your approach, then when it comes to tech strategy?

You know, you mentioned, you know, the the goals that the university has, particularly around the the medical school there and what it will provide to the regions, but overall, how do you ensure with your IT initiatives that they're aligning with those overall strategic goals and that mission of the university?

? Eion Hall?

Well, it's a really, really good question and one that we're actually just starting to rethink about now. So previously, I mean, your strategy is a response to the situation that you find yourself in, right.

And, you know, when I took over this role I, IT was a minority cost centre, order takers, were just necessary. And so our strategy there was around - and we had a lot of technology debt - so our strategy there was about...

was quite internally focused, like it was very much around, let's just be really good at the basics, right. And that was a direct response to where we were. Whereas now, like, we're in a situation where we've got to build strategy.

And with some of these emerging trends, I mean, we're going to talk about at I know at some point, I'm sure that your AI, your, the consumerization of IT, and the expectations that it has; the younger generation that are coming through which we see as our customers every single day.

There are big challenges for us technologically, and there's big ethics conversations to be have around what we use data for, and how we use it. And so I think it's going to be response... more in response to those environmental, those bigger, broader environmental drivers that are going on.

And I wouldn't put it more like at the moment where we're toying with the idea is how does digital both inform and respond to the business strategy? And you've got to have that... both lenses.

So how, where does the, how do you get yourself in the conversations, with the relationships with your peers, and in the senior members of staff and the board and the Council, whoever they might be, around not just what's possible, but what are the big trends that are coming at us?

And how do we how do we manage? And how does the organization position itself to take advantage or not be nailed by those?

So that's informing business strategy, but then once the business strategy, how do we then enable, and let's be very clear that there are two quite two different roles, but we need to serve both.

When I did my MBA many, many years ago - feels like a very long time ago now - I remember every single paper that you go to do, you do an Operations Management paper, and at the end of the paper, the lecturer at some point, wouldn't be able to help himself or tell you why it was important the operations manager was at Exec.

And then you'd have the HR person doing your organisational development/HR paper and that'd be the same about why HR and OD should be at the table. And then you'd have marketing and then so on, and so on, and so on, and finance and everyone again.

But then if you've got a business, like a council or a university, right, you've got this Head of School of Engineering, and you got the Head of School of Medicine, you've got the Head of School of Arts and the Law and so you end up with 14/15 people at your table and is that really an effective exec, I'm not 100% sure.

And so I think to earn the right.... you have to earn the right to be in the inner circle of the strategy making.

And it doesn't really matter whether your discipline is HR, or finance or marketing or IT, if you're really good at what you do, and you respond, and you're and you're building those relationships for the long term, then you get invited to be both part of the setting of the strategy as well as the responding to it.? And that, to me is the biggest difference between a 娇色导航and an IT manager, right?

There's the ability to influence at that level, and that just comes with experience.

So I think that's kind of our approach is to really try and figure out how we have that joined up conversation around business strategy, and then how does then digital enable it rather than just being a passenger?

And so and then from that, I think genuinely having an open mind about what, what are the right things to invest in?

And what are the right approaches to things and be genuinely curious and open minded to different ways and new ways of doing things, because there's a lot of talent, both in the partner community in our in our own university and our faculties, as well as our own staff that I think we need to think more carefully about how those people feel empowered to, to make decisions, and as they relate to them, is probably equally important than it has been to worried about the strategic direction of the organization as well, because they can see that stuff for you.

If you get the right, you know, how do you get alignment without control? I guess is the question there.

Some great points raised there and definitely, that role of the 娇色导航as strategic adviser came through really strongly in our State of the 娇色导航study, in terms of asking the line of business, how they viewed the 娇色导航role there. And yeah, you underline that point quite eloquently there.

And so, you know, can't go without mentioning AI, and you touched on it there. Are there any kind of new or emerging technologies that you're excited about? Um, you know, are you implementing any AI strategies at present?

Or is there anything else that you're playing around with that you think, you know, that that's good for the university going forward? Look, there, there are a few things. I think AI is fascinating. I'm not too sure how it's gonna play out.

I'm not sure any of us are. I think as a sector, we've been guilty of overhyping a lot of things. Before AI,? we were gonna be revolutionized by 5G. And before 5G, it was IoT. And before IoT, it was something else, who knows...

Big Data, virtual reality, augmented reality, you name it, we've we've hyped that and said, 'This is going to be a game changer'. So I think we got a credibility issue around this and, and as a sector around, what are the next big things.

But there's no doubt that AI is hugely influential, we're using it extensively around inside ITS around, you know, your code development, managing those sorts of things. Absolutely, we'll be rolling out Copilot, just trying to get the governance around that right to manage that effectively.

But I think more interesting than the technologies are the changes in behaviors that we're seeing in society, and how do we as institutions, or as organizations responds to those changing behaviors?

And so I think, if you think about the whole, working from home, studying from home, like how do we earn the commute? What sort of society and workplaces do we want? And what is the role of technology in integrating the physical with the virtual?

And how do we, how do we bring... what's our role to bring a much more humanistic, whole-of-person approach to these interactions with people, when we're increasingly replacing people with AI and technology and distance and remote? And anybody from anywhere?

What how do we manage that from the sorts of teams and organizations and products etc, we want to build? Do we still get the same? You know, collective sense of community? I don't know. And what's the role of technology in resolving that.

We've got some big challenges as an institution, we got young people who come here, and they will expect to be able to write all their assignments using large generative models, right. And we are now having huge debates around what what does assessment look like?

Do you have to submit with your assessment, the list of prompts you use to get there? Let's be honest about how it was that you got there? And was that effective prompt using and how might you have done that differently in order to get different outcomes?

And is it biased or unbiased and stuff? Is that the discussion rather than the actual product itself? Like it's a really interesting thing from an assessment point of view? And like, how do you create really good video content? Like look at this?

I mean, you probably at home working, we're here we're engaging, right? So we still create all our content in a lecture theatre. Not all of it, but the most of it right?

And what we're finding is we've got these lecture theaters with 100 people in them - that seat a hundred people -? that 10 to 15 people are watching while we create the content, and then the other 85% of them are consuming it at what time speed time and a half, probably with Copilot giving them a lecture summary.

Right? And here's the key points, right? There's some large language modeling. And so what does that mean for us? There's some really big conversations to have. And what does it mean for data that we put In there? I'm really welcoming.

And I'm really hoping that we're going to have a really grown-up conversation, I hope as an institution shortly, because I'm going to go out to consultation, our new computer rules and regulations policy, which seems really blase and boring.

But we were hoping through that to generate some really good debate on when is data yours, when is data the institution's, what responsibility do you have for data? What responsibility does the organisation have for data?

Are you happy for us using data in this way, this is how we intend to use it.

If I collect a whole lot of demographic and student information data, and it tells me if you're more or less likely to be successful, and I use that data for good, is it okay to still collect that data? I don't know.

There are some big conversations to be had around that. And, and we can track people right on campus, where they go, who they where they've been, what time... how much time they spend in certain places, those sorts of things.

We have those abilities to do that, how do we have a debate, I think, as a sector, as a society about how we should be using these technologies, and I'm really hoping to drive some of that debate at the university because we can't have it out of university, we can we have it?

Um, so I'm really, really hoping that when I put my CCTV and AI policy out there and those sorts of things for debate, I'm really, I'm even hoping we might get a bit of media coverage, because that would be healthy, for us to have grown up conversations about what data we're capturing how we're using it, how we're using AI, are we comfortable with that?

And it's going to be heated. And I think it's going to be difficult, but it shouldn't stop us shying away from it.

And I think for me, that's probably what I think is going to be the most fascinating piece of not so much innovation, sort of skirts your question there, but the big challenge for us as a sector and that innovation is going to be part of the answer to.

? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Yeah, some big questions to be asked there of the campus and the community. And yeah, it will be interesting to hear what comes from that conversation.

And so look, Eion, you mentioned earlier that, you know, you you've done a lot of upgrades of old technology at the university, and that you are experimenting with, with innovation, you're using AI extensively.

So how do you balance that need for you know, looking at cutting edge technology or emerging technology, and then importance of, you know, maintaining your existing stack and making sure your IT infrastructure and systems are being kept up to date. ? Eion Hall?

That's a huge challenge. Particularly for people like me, who love shiny new things, and bigger questions. A big part of it is hiring really good people and trusting them to make good decisions. Is that any different in any industry?

I think, I think that that's a big part of it.

So I'm not going to tell somebody, a senior engineer who's really competent, who knows this environment, like the back of his hand, how much time we should spend on BAU versus how much time he should spend on, you know, projects and stuff.

I'm going to ask a lot of him in terms of projects and stuff, and it's up to him to he'll push back, hopefully if we've got the environment right, when it's too much.

And he'll balance that I expect they - shouldn't say him -? they will balance that against the BAU. And as long as we empower them, I think we're okay.

A big part of it though is just, is just the common sense stuff that I'm sure everybody in most positions doing, which is just getting the commodity stuff into a state where it's just run state.

We have a PB Tech on campus, that's a nice addition for us,? another good partner of ours, they do a great job. So if you've got a problem with your IT here, and you need a new laptop, you go see PB Tech.

What do you do? at home, you go see PB Tech.? I need a new phone. What do I do? Go and see PB Tech? And it works really well. Right? So because people get it, right, I need a new HDMI cable.

Okay, we'll go and see them and they'll sort you out. Right.

And we're helping them move further up the value chain and that and that takes a headache off.?? Selling our data centre, that takes away the headache of managing and running a data centre, like we can just consume it.

It's why we've gone down the SaaS model with Oracle Cloud and HCM and Oracle isn't a particularly nice or user friendly product, but are any ERPs? I hope there are no ERP listeners out there?? They're all a bit nasty.

And you have to jam them in and then spend a few years massaging them to make them work. They're all a bit uncomfortable and horrible. But hopefully by going through the SaaS model, then that'll be stay current, and we won't have to be the big ones again.

And I think that's a big part of it is being very clear in the value chain of where your partners can help and where, where your edge is and how do you get that balance right.

And I think you do that by having an amazing campus,? that's a beautiful environment that people want to hang out in, and hopefully creating enough excitement around some of the projects and stuff like that, that you attract really good people and they manage those things for you.

That's my secret, if there is one. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

And look another challenge that I know keeps a lot of CIOs and CISOs up at night is, of course, the ever evolving threat landscape.

So what's your approach to cybersecurity, then, you know, how do you ensure that security and the privacy of the data, and I'm sure you've got a lot of student and staff data in your IT systems? So how do you ensure that security and privacy? ? Eion Hall?

Investment, investment, a lot of investment time, we have to do it as design. So our network has absolutely no horizontal or lateral movement on it, we've stopped it. So we've taken the ISP view where we're saying every user should only be a risk to themselves.

And if we can manage that. So if I'm infected, I can't infect someone else on my network at an individual level, then somewhat I've managed that risk, where I can.

I'm being very clear on what's important, and what you need to protect and what's not, and not making the stuff that's not difficult. So like we say, you like I said, we're an ISP, for 80% of our users, we provide an internet connection, right?

So there's no big drama. But if you want to access my student management system, or my core financial records, or my core student records, you probably have to give over rights to your firstborn, right?

But people accept that if it's only confined to that small part of the role, which is the sensitive data where people get frustrated, and they fight and push against that is when you put those same controls and stuff that when the risk isn't as high.

And I think that's a real that's a critical part of our strategy has been very clear on what's important. And what are the what we have to protect and make no apologies, and be very transparent about that. And make no apologies for that.

But not to have the same... Well, we have 100%, unfiltered ungoverned, unmanaged internet access for everybody. If you want that, that's that. I've got researchers that research the dark web, I've got researchers that create malicious software, right? For research purposes.

We can't trust our own, never mind those out there with their bad code, you know, so for us, it's about zero trust. And then just being very, very clear.

The thing I'm a bit excited about - again our policy stuff - is we're making the responsibility for data sitting with the data owner, not with the central IT function.

So if you're running the School of Health, and you're the Dean of Health, you are responsible for the privacy of the data that your school holds and of course we will help you. But it's just like kind of a health and safety culture.

So we try to build it in that way. It's changed the conversations a lot more at the management and the senior leadership level by saying...

they're coming to me saying 'I've got a whole lot of risk here, how can I manage it' versus me going to them going, 'You've got a whole lot of risk there, let me manage it'.

And so that's also part of it, we've been very clear about not only what is important, but who's accountable and responsible for IT security. And it's often not ITS. And as I've said to my boss, I need very little right data to run IT. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

It's such an interesting approach. I love that. Really, really great that you are approaching it in that manner and making it other people's responsibility as well. And not just on the on your team.

And look Eion, you spoke earlier about some of the partners that support you at the University of Waikato. So when you are going out to market, and you're looking for providers and partners, what do you look for and what to you makes a good partnership? ? Eion Hall?

You have to have a genuine interest in the business, I think. Look, what am I looking for? Honesty seems an integrity, right. And this is interesting.

One of the things I do when I'm going to market or I'm hiring somebody, I'll I'll talk to them and I'll say so you're you're selling... you're going to be my, say, my implementation partner for my ERP system, right?

I'm less interested in your show boat references that you're going to give me that are pre canned.

I'm more interested in the ones where we can have an honest conversation that says when I tried to do the ERP at Company Y, we actually got kicked out of there on our... on our backsides because we didn't get it right.

And what we didn't get right was this and this. And if we would do it again, if actually we're honest about where we've got wrong. And we're actually honest about if we were to do it again, what we do differently next time. Right.

And that's far more interesting to me, than a gleaming CV that tells you how you seamlessly implemented an ERP system and blah, blah,.. Well, you either had too much money, or it's a lie, because no one's seamlessly done it, right?

They're horrible, let's be honest about these things which are difficult. But be honest about the learnings and why we've got the battle scars and the things we have that makes us more effective. So that's a big part of it.

So that's what I mean about honesty and integrity, right, as I'm looking for demonstratable experience at learning, rather than rather than necessarily the results on their own, is what I'm looking for in partners.

And then just for where there are? genuinely Win Win opportunities, where somebody is wanting to use our name, or our brand or access to our researchers and in return we'd like product and, and there's a natural synergy there between the two organizations, and they make a bit of profit and, and we get access to resourcing, and they get access to ours, and they take on our grads, and that's good for our reputation or whatever.

But we're looking for those genuine partnerships that don't really cost a lot of money to add too much to around the edges. And, and that also helps.

So a real challenge is were becoming increasingly managed, I mean, central government -? we're independent of central government, universities - but they like to get more and more of their hands on us around demands around our procurement policies are starting to look more and more like central government procurement policies, although previously they haven't.

So that's a challenge for us to manage. And I have hats off to my friends in central government, who manage that sort of thing. That's a challenge that we're having to grapple with.

But like genuinely, you know, we just want people want genuine partnerships and have a track record for learning. And I think if we get that, right, doesn't know what you'd look for if you're an employing somebody, or most relationships, and I don't think it's terribly different.

? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Indeed Now, look, switching gears a bit, tell us a bit about you as a leader, Eion. How would you describe your leadership style? ? Eion Hall?

I think my team would say I'm frantic. Um, Look, I get... I'm excited. I get excited. I'm excitable, probably. There's probably a term. I'm optimistic. I think that goes a long way when you're leading people, I hope.

There's people that you're excited about the opportunity that's in front of you and the the optimistic about, about our ability to execute on whatever that opportunity is. I hire good people, and then figure out what roles they might play.

Hopefully, ah, my HR department don't listen to this, because that's technically not how we're supposed to do it. Within within realms, but yeah, I like to hire good people. And then like genuinely inquisitive learning, good communicators.

And then we worry about the skills and how they play in the team. And I think that's really, really important. I don't I'm not good at the detail, which I think is probably useful. So yeah, that's probably been where my leadership is .

The thing I'm hopefully proudest of, is I think is the development that I've seen, and people who have worked for me have now gone on to do amazing things. If you say to anybody in these sorts of roles, I think we all say the same thing.

When I say what's the legacy? You go, oh, some amazing people. We were in relationships that we grew and built. So I think that's probably the biggest part of my leadership.

And like, in some ways, I'm terribly proud of some of the people who've worked for me for 15 years. But in other ways, it's a huge honour. But should they have? Or should,? should I be reporting to them? Like, how does this work? Like this...

And I think if you're having those genuine conversations with your leadership team about those sorts of things, and leadership itself.

And even right now, lik a team of us we are working with an organiSational psychologist about talking about how we, as a team are going to agree to come together and support each other.

And we're an established team but we think there's room for improvement so I'm probably the most organistional development focused IT Director, like I see that's really my passion. I think there's there's more organisational development in an IT context than it is probably IT. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

And any other and tricks or tips that you've found for getting the best out of your team and you know, helping them, creating an environment that helps them thrive? ? Eion Hall?

I mean not coaching or telling, is probably a big one. And even not coaching and actually just getting out of the way is, because sometimes we get in the way. I think it's really important to be cognizant of where you've come from.

And so I came from a non-technical environment into a program management, project program director management role. So I skipped the whole technical part that I'm sure many of my colleagues and others have been through.

And in a way, that was a strength for me when it came to managing some of the technical and those teams, because I genuinely had to get out of their way, because I was absolutely no use to them. And I just had to trust and manage them.

What became interesting is, when I became CIO, and I hired a program manager, being charged with a program of work, was I equally able to get out of the way when they were doing the job that I used to do?

And am I going to allow them to pull apart my baby, right? Right.

And it is, it is what it is, it is a baby, right, you start there, you build up a program office, you, you do it in your own way, it's sort of a, you know, it's your image of what it should be and, and you took a lot of time and effort and energy and resources to, to make it work the way you wanted to.

And it made you so successful, you became the CIO.

And now when someone else takes on that role that you used to do, do you have the humility to go, actually, I'm gonna allow you to tear that apart, and do it completely different in their own image or not.

And I think if you can do that, then that goes a huge way for actually allowing people to be really effective at their jobs, because then you're not telling them how to do it. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So what would be your hopes for the next generation of CIOs coming through? Any advice that you can give them? ? Eion Hall?

Like I said, build relationships, meaningful relationships, well before you need them, will want to use them. Because it's just, you know...? just building those relationships with with your peers who are going to go on this journey through your career with you.

With your partners, you never know when a partner becomes a peer and a peer becomes a partner. Support, support those people who genuinely want to make a difference. And they'll support you. If you genuinely want to do it and make a difference as well.

And that's probably my biggest advice. And just commit, like, one of the things I've learned pretty quickly is there's a million ways of doing anything in IT and it actually doesn't really matter terribly much which way you do it. Just pick one and commit, and just...

and just take a stance and have a crack at something. And if it doesn't work, get off that one and try the next one. But commit to it. Don't spend too much time wondering if something is the right thing to do or not. ? Cathy O'Sullivan? Great advice.

And listen, tell us what is important to you and the team in the months ahead? Are there any other exciting initiatives in the pipeline for you and the team at University of Waikato? ? Eion Hall?

We're really excited about the medical school. So that business case has been submitted. So that will go to Cabinet we're hoping September. We're pretty excited that it was in Luxon's, 90 Day Plan, his next 90 day plan, to get that signed off.

We're hoping that he wouldn't do that if there's good political support. We think we can make a big difference in this; we're looking at a completely different model. It's not a medical school as Auckland or or Otago currently have, it's postgraduate taught. It focuses purely on primary health.

The whole theory is was we recruit from the areas that we need the doctors in and then we send the people back. We know that New Zealand's completely underserved in our medical schools when we benchmark internationally.

I heard it spoken about just yesterday that the weird Hunger Games thing we have going on at Otago and Auckland with all these first year medical kids trying to get into second year medical school. That's not normal. That's not the normal model in the world.

Most places, if you bright enough you can find the medical school to train you. Here, we don't have enough doctors, we certainly don't have enough Māori and Pasifika doctors and importing our doctors isn't going to solve that; we need to create them and we need to grow them.

And we think we've got a really unique opportunity or proposition to make a real difference to that problem. And isn't that why we're here is to make bigger changes and impact on society as a whole rather than necessarily just about the tech. So that's got us pretty excited.

And we're really excited about I mean, there's a lot of partners out there who are really keen to engage with us on the technology of this because it's not often that you get a chance to build a medical school from new and we're really excited.

We want it to be completely dry medical school, a lot of virtual reality, a lot of robotics, those sorts of things, your fitness trackers, your health, your wearable devices, how that impacts your primary health care, you use that to gather information, your teleconferencing...

So how do you effectively deliver health, primary health care, into remote parts of the world using technology is a really interesting, really interesting problem to solve. So we're really excited about that.

If that, if that comes off in September and we crack into that we've only got 18 months or two years or so to get the whole thing up and running. So that'll be that'll be pretty big if we if we can pull that off.

Otherwise, we're coming into a bit of an enterprise digital strategy and that that's going to be fun and exciting to do as well. And just to just a bit of sanity check is what's the role of digital in this organisation?

And how does digital influence the organisation's strategy are two questions that we are going to put a lot of money, and time and effort into. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Lots ahead for you and the team at the University of Waikato! Eion Hall, Chief Information Officer at the University of Waikato, thank you so much for your time today.