CIO churn
It seemed like a year of mass exodus with many CIOs moving onto new jobs or ventures. Qantas saw Robert Marcolina be appointed group executive strategy, transformation and IT.
This came after the airline announced earlier in the year that 5000 jobs will go over the next three years. A Qantas spokesman said at the time that it “can’t rule out” changes to the IT department.
Coles Group’s general manager of IT, Conrad Harvey, left in September following a restructure of its store support centre in Melbourne, with 438 positions gone.
David Whiteing became Commonwealth Banks’ new CIO in July, after Michael Harte left in May to join Barclays Bank in London as its chief operations and technology officer.
Anne Weatherston left ANZ Bank in April, and the former consumer CIO at Citgroup in the US, Scott Collary, took on the role in November.
Early in the year, Clive Whincup left Westpac for Woolworths CIO role, and was replaced with former Commonwealth Bank tech leader, Dave Curran, in July.
Suncorp Life CIO Fiona Floyd quit her post as CIO in July as the organisation embarked on an internal restructure. Former Suncorp Business Services CEO Jeff Smith was appointed as IBM’s global CIO, based in the United States.
Patrick Eltridge quit his role as CIO at Telstra to explore international opportunities. Andrew Wiles left Vodafone as CIO in October after one year and eight months in the role.
In April, Michelle Beveridge moved from Open Universities, where she was CIO, to Peak Adventure Travel Group and Peter Nikoletatos departed from Australian National University as CIO.
Former Australian Government CIO, Glenn Archer, was also appointed as research VP for Gartner's public sector research group in April.
Westfield’s director of information technology, Peter Bourke quit his post and will leave the shopping centre organisation on December 31.
Some CIOs got promoted. Suncorp Group’s former CIO Matt Pancino moved into the CEO role of business services. Paul Russell, former CIO for Salmat Digital CIO and Fairfax Digital, took on new role as managing director of off-shore software development provider SoftwareSeni.
Open government and hackathons
The cost and privacy challenges of open government were addressed this year at the Australia 3.0 government forum in Melbourne. The role of the ICT community to step in and propose cost effective ways of anonymising and continuously updating datasets and the need for clear security steps for agencies to follow to help build their confidence to release more data were discussed.
The NSW government also called on the private sector to suggest new ways to reuse or reinterpret data held by its agencies under a newly established crowdsourcing initiative.
The Queensland government plans to introduce legislation next year that will cement open data for the long term.
Many hackathons were held in relation to the open data movements being pushed in government.
Transport for NSW, in partnership with Deloitte, held its Codeworks hackathon in September, which resulted in eight worthy projects to be further developed. The customer-facing apps are for mostly road drivers to get them to and from their destinations faster, easier and more comfortably.
NICTA held its InfraHack hackathon in August to tackle some of the biggest infrastructure-related problems such as traffic congestion, safety issues and pollution. The projects were about making Melbourne a smart city when it comes to its use of infrastructure.
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