IT Project Excellence Award

In partnership with Project Management Institute of NZ and Vector Communications

WINNER: OSPRI Insite Project Team OSPRI New Zealand

The OSPRI Insite Project team developed new collaborative working methods to deliver a product that raises the bar for animal health.

OSPRI New Zealand helps to protect New Zealand's reputation as a leading producer of primary produce for the local and international market, and its TBfree programme is a vitally important part of its work. OSPRI ensures that cattle and deer for over 75,000 herd owners are tested for Bovine Tuberculosis. Testing for TB can be fraught with uncertainty, so OSPRI needed a new approach when upgrading its Animal Disease Management System to help manage its TB testing process.

OSPRI's leadership group assembled an expert in-house IT team, including contractors, who would self-organise, self-manage and ultimately be responsible for the project's success. The team came up with the idea of working in small groups to pick-off specific tasks, "huddles" that would quickly form to devise a solution, then disperse again, ready to re-form and tackle the next task.

Excellence in Software

In partnership with the NZ Software Association and Software Escrow NZ

WINNER: OSPRI Animal Disease Management System OSPRI New Zealand

OSPRI New Zealand helps to protect New Zealand's reputation as a leading producer of primary produce for the local and international market, and its TBfree programme is a vitally important part of its work. OSPRI ensures that cattle and deer for over 75,000 herd owners are tested for Bovine Tuberculosis. Testing for TB can be fraught with uncertainty, so OSPRI needed a new approach when upgrading its Animal Disease Management System to help manage its TB testing process.

Not only did the system need to cope with 'ifs', 'buts' and 'maybes' thrown up by inherent variables, it also needed to support an end-to-end process that combined system logic and decisions made by the vets, based on in-field variables, and it needed to be accessible and intuitive to a wide range of users.

The result has turned out an effective tool with interactive maps integrated with a new UI, and a system that puts everything the user needs at their fingertips. The end-to-end functionality and intuitive operation means that users can create documents from templates, and store them against a particular herd, and view, edit, print and email these documents from within the application.

Excellence in Health Informatics

In partnership with Health Informatics NZ and Orion Health

WINNER: Susan Miles Canterbury District Health Board

Susan Miles from Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB) was recognized for her outstanding leadership and tireless efforts towards advocating and orchestrating the adoption of eProsafe electronic Child Protection and Family Violence web application.

Miles saw the need to improve on cross-DHB information sharing and to develop a system to help ensure collection of valuable information for the Child Protection/ Family Violence area.

Her commitment to launch and implement eProsafe has led to its successful deployment in West Coast District Health Board, South Canterbury District Health Board and Nelson Marlborough District Health Board. Recently, another milestone has been achieved by having the Southern District Health Board agreeing to adopt eProsafe by the end of 2014.

Excellence in IT Education

In partnership with CITRENZ and MBIE

WINNER: Tim Bell University of Canterbury

Professor Tim Bell at the University of Canterbury initiated and developed the CS Unplugged project which has grown and is now being used all around the world to teach the concepts of Computer Science to all ages without the use of computers.

Bell was also a key contributor to the Digital Technologies Achievement Standards and has contributed substantially and widely to the detail work of creating curriculum standards.

Since the creation of the standards, Tim has been extremely effective in dealing with the issue of up-skilling and professional development for teachers in Computer Science and Programming strands.

As an all around champion for computer science education, he was involved with developiung online resources for teaching Computer Science to students, and creating and running the CS4HS (Computer Science for High School) symposium conferences for teachers in Wellington and Christchurch.

Excellence in Public Sector IT

In partnership with GOVIS and Datacom

WINNER: Department of Internal Affairs Passport Redevelopment project

The Department of Internal Affairs sought to implement an extensive transformation in the New Zealand passport application, renewal and delivery system, the first such project since 1993.

The programme has seen the successful rollouts of new passport application forms and automated document scanning technologies in 2010; a new core passport interface (KIWI) in mid 2012 to enable more effective enrolment, assessment and approval of passport applications; functional releases within the KIWI system throughout 2013, including a fully electronic workflow business process for passport applications; an Online Renewals Service for Adults to renew their passport online in November 2012; and an Online Photo Checker launched early this year.

The redevelopment project was delivered in time and $1.7 million under the original budget estimates, and in the long term it is on track to deliver projected savings of $93.3 million over 10 years, with 94 per cent of staff saying they felt supported through the massive changes involved.

Internet Entrepreneur of the Year

In partnership with InternetNZ and the Internet Industry Awards

WINNER: Craig Smith Founder and CEO, Education Perfect

Craig Smith was still in high school when he developed his online self-study aid, Language Perfect in 2003.

Smith took that idea and four years later joined forces with his brother, Shane, and their friend, Scott Cardwell, to launch Education Perfect, which today is one of the most?used educational websites on the planet, and home to one of the largest global online language competitions.

Education Perfect is designed to teach pupils simple concepts across many subjects, including maths, science, history, English, biology, accounting and enterprise, and this year, has helped students answer more than 500 million questions from 300,000 students. Since winning its first award in 2007, Education Perfect has grown from three employees to a staff of 30, aiming to provide the software support its founders see lacking in online curricula.

Young IT Professional of the Year

In partnership with NZRise 

WINNER: Tanya Gray Gather Workshops 

Tanya has made Gather Workshops her life-focus since leaving her software development job in February 2014. As the lead presenter for the Gather Workshops team, Tanya is on a mission to put computer programming into the heart of secondary school education.

Tanya has led the development of Gather Workshop's open source materials, and helped launch the Gather's Code Club for Teachers Google Group which assigns member educators coding missions. She is also working with a global organisation that gets young women into programming with Ruby on Rails, and co-founded the Game of Codes team-based competition at local bars to make programming more accessible and fun.

New Zealand IT Professional of the Year

In partnership with IT Professionals NZ 

WINNER: Gareth Berry Unleashed Software 

Gareth Berry trod an atypical path to become one of Unleashed Software's big success stories in recent years. He moved from head of sales at Unleashed to become the company's CEO in 2010, and has since raised the company's profile and strength by forging partnerships with key software vendors, expanding to global markets, and developing a scalable, web-based version of the company's inventory management software.

His enthusiasm for inventory management and his vision of the future of this field has helped drive the business to grow to thousands of customers in 80 countries.