Winston Fong, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare

Winston is Vice President ICT at F&P Healthcare. Winston is a transformational leader who continually focuses on innovations across the business’ value stream. He has a passion to attract, retain and inspire future ICT leaders in a company that has been doubling in size every 5 years.

Winston is a technology and business evangelist with over 17 years’ experience. He has led significant change over the last few years inside a company that has experienced triple figure growth. The Judges were impressed by Winston’s sustained leadership over many years of an IT team that has earned the respect of the business through successful delivery of significant technology transformation on a global stage.

Mike Jenkins, The Instillery

Mike has successfully founded a sustainable and rapidly growing company, built a great culture and is contributing back to the ICT community. The judges were particularly impressed with his passion and ability to drive disruptive thinking and use it to help emerging kiwi companies excel on the world stage.

The judges were impressed with the inspirational line up of emerging ICT leaders; they all have a clear vision and talent to make it happen. They noticed the strength of conviction particularly in light of outside influences and international investors wanting to buy in. All three were prepared to make the hard calls, build a team of great people around them and drive for results. One leader stood out above the rest, someone who has already built his team and is already a leader in the international arena. He is our winner and that leader is Mike Jenkins.

New Zealand Transport Agency

The NZ Transport Agency executive team culture is collaborative and high performing. The team provided clear and consistent leadership for the Enterprise Management Content solution, setting an excellent example themselves by attending training sessions with their teams and endorsing the right behaviours for the right outcomes. The new solution means that information is now being accessible anywhere anytime, improving collaboration with customers, partners and other agencies. The judges were impresses by a team of leaders who went the extra mile, took the people with them, and understood the importance of leading by example.

The Mind Lab by Unitec

Established in 2013, The Mind Lab by Unitec is a unique education collaboration between a public education provider and a specialist education lab dedicated to enhancing digital literacy capability of young New Zealanders and the implementation of contemporary digital learning practices in the teaching profession.

After winning this award in 2014 the Judges were looking for something new and exceptional with this year’s nomination and they were not disappointed.

Since winning the award in 2014 The Mind Lab have;

• Taken what was an Auckland-Centric model catering for 6,000 students annually and scaled it rapidly into a national model that includes four dedicated regional Labs, and four satellite Labs catering for 40,000 students annually.
• Launched the Postgraduate Certificate in Applied Practice (Digital & Collaborative Learning). This postgraduate programme has generated huge demand from the teaching community, as school Boards of Trustees, principle and teachers look to extend their capability in the new technologies, pedagogies and practices that will enhance student engagement, achievement and raise awareness of opportunities that come with a career in ICT.

The judges were also impressed by the sustainability of the Mind Lab business model, one that has supported significant growth and expansion in operations over the past 2 years, and the strong social/digital marketing capability that has been developed to support all Mind Lab students and teachers.

Westpac New Zealand Limited

Through a process of co-creation the entire ICT team at Westpac NZ have defined and built a new culture based on the principles of, Ownership, Achievement, Integrity, Collaboration Growth and Fun.

The Westpac ICT team have moved from traditionally having a reputation of “being hard to deal with” to being “a team with increased levels of energy and enthusiasm” and a team that “has a far sharper focus on the customer”. At the same time staff engagement levels with the ICT team have moved from bottom- quartile in industry comparisons to now being top-quartile.

The Culture-Led transformation of the ICT team at Westpac has been significant in both scale and pace of change. The judges were impressed by the crowd-sourced collaborative nature of the culture change programme and the way in which members of the IT team had used their own “real-life” stories to bring it to life.

As well as delivering improvements in staff engagement the programme has delivered an uplift in operating efficiency and delivery of customer-focussed business outcomes.

Wayne Norrie

Wayne Norries' 30 years IT industry experience in across a diverse mixture of companies and geographies has enabled him to distill a unique perspective on forming and managing successful teams. In 2002 Wayne and his business partner, Roger Cockayne, led a management buy-out of Hitachi Data Systems NZ and Revera was born. Since then Revera has gone from strength to strength, growing into the major player in the IaaS landscape it is today, growing from 10 staff in 2002 to 150 by 2015. Wayne is the embodiment of the business philosophy

Wayne's contribution has gone beyond his business acumen. His business philanthropy is well known in the business community and Wayne has significantly reinvested back into the sector across 9 companies which he actively supports, and mentors many more. He provides much time to the informal coffee list to provide guidance to the young entrepreneurs in the tech sector.

Believing the Technology sector suffered from fragmentation and silos, Wayne saw a way to further unite the industry through recognition. He undertook to transform the Hi Tech Awards as Chair of the Hi Tech Trust. He completely transformed the goal, and the way in which the Hi Tech Trust went about achieving it.

Beyond these achievements, the list of Wayne's contributions to the tech sector is colossal – he is the current chair of the Hi Tech Awards and he is also currently a Director of NZTE, and Chairman of Online Republic, Sportsground, and the Hi Tech Trust. has chaired Fronde, Team BLM, and Maven, and been a director for Aspeq, Revera and Hi Growth Trust. Wayne was bestowed a Fellowship from the Institute of Management, and a Chartered Fellowship from the Institute of Directors, where he delivers a ‘Culture and Leadership in the Boardroom’ course for experienced directors.