Andrew Nimick Point Concept twitter.com/andrewnim

Friday, the third day of the NZCS innovation conference, was a slight change of tack. It started with Greg Lane who once ran Clear in NZ and now works for IP3, an international body set up to promote professional conduct in the IT industry. Greg was a great way to start the day and made some great arguments for the approaches the industry needs to take in the way it deals with customers.

This was followed by a panel on the future of ICT. The panel was made up by NZCS chief executive Paul Matthews (chair), web guru Nat Torkington, CPIT head of school Alison Young, TUANZ CEO Ernie Newman and Orcon founder Seeby Woodhouse.
This was a very mixed panel, but all seemed to agree that mobile would indeed see the greatest growth in ICT; particularly in payment methods and education. Also with education the switch from printed books to interactive ebooks and online learning management systems such as the Kiwi-made Litmos.

Before lunch we had a great keynote on how to encourage young people into the industry from Nat Torkington. Nat talked about his experiences organising conferences for O'rielly publishing and the predominance of men especially in programming. He had been asked to speak about how we can get more females into the industry, but as Nat said, it was the same way we got more people into the industry. By teaching correctly to start with. By stopping the poor practice of teaching word processing and spread sheets as ICT. Instead teaching how to create and manipulate data and information by showing young people how to learn the skills they need and how to create their own applications to do things they value. What 10 year old is actually interested in spreadsheets?

Nat referred to the new child friendly training languages such as Sketch from Stanford University, which teaches the methods of programming via visual building blocks. There are many others and I posted links to them in the Twitter stream #nzcs50.

After lunch was Sam Knowles, the CEO of Kiwibank, talking about taking banking into the 21st century. The bank's approach to user centered design and finding new ways of providing services which reduce costs and yet also increase customer satisfaction, basically rethinking the branch experience.

Next was an international panel on professionalism and this was a strange session. There were actually two sessions going on, or rather two conversations. The one led by the people on the panel:
Chaired by NZCS president Don Robertson, panelists include IFIP president Basie von Solms, past president of the British Computer Society and founder of IP3 Charles Hughes, past Chairman of the Canadian Council of IT Professionals and current IP3 Chairman Greg Lane and Honorary Secretary to IFIP and Reader in Computer Science at Birkbeck, University of London, Roger Johnson.

And one via the Twitter stream which was mostly at odds with what was being said on-stage. While the stage was talking about strict rules and certification, the floor was talking about innovation and personal (not imposed) professionalism. When I spoke to Paul Matthews he had been monitoring the Twitter stream and was taking the comments onboard. I will come back to this issue at a later date. It is worth a further discussion, one I hope our readers will engage in.

The conference closing keynote was a true highlight as we heard about Kiwi innovation and what can be achieved when passion is allowed to run riot.
Ian Taylor of Animation Research ltd, took us on four journeys through his life and showed us how his nine man team produced all the graphical imagery we see at international sporting events.
I will post a notice when the Videos go up, if you do nothing else please watch the video of Ian's keynote.

Ian also showed us how they made a children's program for TVNZ and how the children made the accompanying website and filled it with material. Sadly both will be off air very soon. I was not the only person who was aggrieved at such a wasted opportunity to foster the programmers of the future and after the keynote a few people gathered around Ian to see what could be done. With the passion which was evident I will be watching this space with great interest.

The conference closed up with a lovely dinner paid for by Microsoft which included a well timed blue screen of death.

Overall the conference has shown that with the present leadership of Paul Mathews and Don Robertson, it can and will be a great voice for IT in New Zealand. The conference raised many questions, maybe more than questions than answers. But that is why innovation in IT happens, people trying to create new and better ways of doing things and answering questions.
Do we need to redefine ICT? Yes, I think we do, especially as ICT becomes more and moor the backbone of so many things we do from consuming media (also creating) to how we interact with our surroundings and also the more traditional but changing ways we use it.
New Zealand is an innovative country and this is reflected in its IT people; what we sometimes lack is the backing and the courage to just go out there and get it on. If we need any help from government it is not regulatory, it is assistance and to iterate things and just put them out there. It is small funds to create small things which may well turn into big things. It is to encourage and reward true innovation, not just look for the safe methods.

We also need to drop the term engineer. Modern programming is not like building bridges and methods of scaling applications bear little resemblance to road building. Building IT systems with those methods have led to over complex massive systems which the users are lost in and which they try to get around.

That is the pain point New Zealanders are good at fixing and those are the projects we should be supporting.

Will NZCS be around in another 50 years?
Yes I think it will, it will have changed, but it will still be there, and it will remind us of the road we have travelled to get where we are.

And that is a very fine thing indeed.