Chris Buxton Email & Phone Number

Wellington, Wellington Region, New Zealand

Wellington, Wellington Region, New Zealand

Wellington, Wellington Region, New Zealand

The Digital Public Service branch supports the Government Chief Digital Officer (GDCO) in the implementation of the Strategy for a Digital Public Service. Working with agencies ensures Digital investment is delivering efficient and effective value outcomes for NZ.The Agency Partnerships team is comprised of specialist consultants providing targeted guidance, and practical support to agencies.Responsibilities: • Develop and maintain a customer-centred consulting model, including customer needs, core capabilities required, and a cross-functional view across the broader Branch.• Maintain awareness of emerging trends and changes in the Public Service system that will impact the work of the Group; and develop the right strategies and set the right objectives and priorities in response to these. • Build, lead, and motivate a consulting team, ensuring the appropriate skills, competencies and customer-centric culture is maintained to support effective delivery of services.• Takes a lead stakeholder management role by actively establishing, building, and maintaining effective relationships with agencies, understanding their needs and driversAchievements: • Led the organisation and set up of the first Government Digital Hui, bringing together digital leaders from across the public Service for a 1-day event.• Led the strategic response to the Digital Skills challenges facing NZ. Providing critical insights to government, developing the strategic response and action plan, and executive and Ministerial briefings.• Improved investment support through the budget process through the definition of transparent assessment criteria, informing investment prioritisation.• Improved data insights into the Public Service Digital ecosystem by delivering data collection and management solutions, leveraging existing technology, reducing the burden on agencies to provide data.

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

Responsibilities: • Lead the delivery of Digital Business Services ensuring operational service levels are met• Set and implement the digital strategy by working with cross-functional partners to map and transition traditional processes to digital• Be a digital evangelist, championing the use of digital technology and practices to engender a digital mindset from the top down• Ensure collaboration, knowledge sharing, and digital best practices between partners and colleagues to help embed a robust digital ecosystem• Measure ROI on digital projects, fine-tuning approaches as needed to ensure we're investing in the right tools and resources• Work with teams across the business to generate innovative digital solutions for products, services, processes, customer experiences, marketing channels, and business models and serve as a cross-functional change agent across the organizationAchievements: • Transformed the user operating environment to a mobile-first, activity-based working footing, enabling flexibility and adaptability. This encompassed facilities capabilities, desktop and supporting infrastructure and support models.• Provided the strategic vison, leadership and planning to move Stats NZ to become 100% hybrid ‘As a Service’ based organisation, comprising public and private cloud services.• Implemented an organisational change program to build agility and increase business responsiveness. Moved the technology operating model to an agile DevOps model, together with a agile investment portfolio to ensure alignment to business priorities.• Transition the most complex budgeting area of Stats NZ from an asset-based CAPEX model to an ‘on demand’ OPEX model. Provided financial dashboards to provide transparency informing optimisation of this new environment, resulting in savings of $5M p.a. in the first 2 years.

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

Responsibilities: • Develop technical aspects of the company’s strategy to ensure alignment with its business goals• Providing technical leadership at the enterprise level and serve an integral role in operations and business development.• Led the Technology team in identifying, comparing, selecting, and implementing technology solutions and partnerships to meet current and future needs• Advocating and communicating technology capabilities internally and externally, including leadership, customers, partners, and vendors• Oversee the technological infrastructure (networks and computer systems) in the organisation to ensure optimal performance and security.Achievements: • Reedified the organisation Information System Strategic Plan, providing a clear vision for staff with transparent linkages and integration into the organisation strategy. Provided strong engagement with stakeholders through traceability between strategic ICT initiatives and the organizational long-term plan.• Driving force behind the Christchurch Integrated Government Accommodation, delivering shared ICT services to collocated agencies. Initially 9 agencies in one building, this has grown to 16 agencies, 3000 staff in 9 buildings. The model delivered is deployed as the preferred option for government shared accommodation.• Initiated activities to stimulate innovation and drive cultural change, including the adoption of Salesforce.com for customer management and increased vendor engagement to identify opportunities• Delivered organizational change program, restructuring the ICT group to align to business functions to create improved integration, understanding and responsiveness to needs. Facilitated a personnel cost reduction of 20%

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

GCSB contributes to New Zealand’s national security by providing information assurance and cyber security to the New Zealand Government and critical infrastructure organisations, collecting and analysing intelligence in accordance with the Government’s priorities, and providing cooperation and assistance to other New Zealand government agencies.As Chief Information Officer I was responsible for all data and information assets and the delivery of all organizational and operations ICT services.Responsibilities: • Set objectives and strategies for the ICT department both within GCSB and how it supports cross government and international integration of the intelligence community.• Plan the implementation of new systems and provide guidance to IT professionals, operational analysts and other staff within the organisation• Monitor changes or advancements in technology to discover new opportunities and threats and identify ways the organisation can gain a competitive advantageAchievements: • Relocated 5 agencies into a new site, collocating and enabling interoperability. I accomplished this while reducing ICT delivery costs through the implementation of shared services capability, operating at the Top-Secret SCI level, providing collaborative working environments, centralised phone systems, VTC, printing and resource management, amongst others• Implemented big data and analytic solutions, increasing access to data accompanied by secure government agency collaboration through implementing enhanced certificate-based security architecture with policy-based information management strategy• Broad relationship management both within NZ and internationally. Represented NZ on international committees, defining and agreeing on secure interoperability strategies and standard and information sharing agreements.• Implemented cross agency collaboration platform connecting the NZ Defense and Intelligence sector, enabling the sharing of information and collaboration.

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

Managing a team of software and infrastructure engineers developing specialised business solutions.- Improved reliability, expanded performance, and cut support costs by 30% with consolidation of disparate services and improved development practices using agile development techniques and enhanced quality assurance, testing and release processes- Introduced capability strategy involving Services based architecture, modular application framework and certificate based security improving efficiency and effectiveness, maintaining productivity while reducing team size- Represented NZ on international working groups defining and agreeing information management, application and analytical interoperability strategies and standards- Defined application development and analytical architecture supporting Big Data in response to the significant growth in data

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

Manager of this bespoke software development and infrastructure Project valued at $600K, from receipt of the initial RFP, devising a bespoke JAVA based technical solution. I managed the proposal development team defining the solution and leading liaison and presentation to the customer. Upon winning the contract, I also managed the implementation. This was a very time constrained Project, which I was able to successfully complete, 3 months ahead of the legislative deadline. The application comprises a regulatory database application, Web Site and interface, supporting the changes to the regulatory and ministerial reporting requirements for NZ Legal practitioners. This was all implemented on a virtual hosted infrastructure, provided by Infinity Solutions as the vendor. • Major organisational business change involving the restructuring of the New Zealand Law Society, from multiple distributed organisations to a central single society model. This requires significant stakeholder management to ensure key stakeholders were fully engaged in the process• Helped define and migrate many of the Law Societies key systems to a vendor hosted IT environment, reducing their costs while improving resilience and availability• Development team of 10, including business analysts, developers, Infrastructure engineers, and testers, developing using the Rational Unified Process (RUP) • Successfully managed the response to the RFP including, establishing scope, defining solution, estimating costs, setting budget, determining schedules and submission to Infinity CEO to gain approval to move forward. Held several presentations to the customer prior to gaining final approval

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

My family and I Decided that is was time to leave the RAF and build a new career, with a better lifestyle, relocating to New Zealand. My first position in New Zealand was as a Contract Project Management consultant for various organisations in various roles including bespoke software development, IT Systems implementations and general PM services covering all aspects of project management including stakeholder management, budgeting, project reporting, team management, communications management, business change management, and overall delivery of a range of project services.

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

Assigned as Project Manager to deliver a medical assessment system implemented as a Software as a service (SaaS), providing capability to multiple District Health Boards and the transition to Operations using the ITIL model.• Application and Infrastructure Project involving the establishment of all environments necessary for the system including virtualised hosts, test and development systems.• Significant Vendor engagement with a vendor from Canada, involving distributed development and the establishment of communications lines between vendor developers and Health Intelligence support staff to ensure ongoing relationships can support operational capability.

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

I was responsible for the provision of operational service support services to the PeopleSoft capability team, with NZ Post IT department, liaising with vendors to ensure support targets were maintained. In this temporary assignment I was responsible for the management and tracking of Incidents, Problems and Changes through the NZ Post implementation of the ITIL framework.

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

Assigned as PM for a $4.8M application development project, developing an Oracle based extension to the mainframe based, beneficiary financial management system. The Project was in trouble suffering major delays, 8 months behind schedule, due to severe quality failures and a loss of team cohesion. I was able to refocus the team and bring the Project to a satisfactory conclusion, enabling the meeting of required legislative deadlines. • Significant vendor management, involving two major IT vendors, each independently developing separate parts of the system. The Project had suffered from communications breakdown, leading to a lack of momentum and progress. I re-established communications through he establishment of working groups to identify issues and provide defined actions• Strong Scope and Budget management to bring the Project back under control and determine the final financial position. Weekly and Monthly financial reporting to CIO and Programme level• Stakeholder management, including the CFO, a key requirement to ensure user expectations were managed

Bachelor Of Science (Bsc)(Hons), Computer Software Engineering

Education record