“It’s the most wonderful time of the year?..”…or is it?!…It has been a busy December getting things ready for the break (summer this side of the planet too), and ensuring we are prepared for the first part of 2025, which will pick up in pace significantly.

It is also a time to review and reflect with the team, looking back on achievements across what has been an eventful year. The tìma (team) organised a lovely morning tea session on our last day, complete with some small chocolate gifts and rather inspired AI generated sketches, and human generated limericks for us all!

The work / mahi

I’ll give a quick overview of the year, as December involved tying up some loose ends on a lot of this work.

Cost Savings

The public service in general across NZ have been busy meeting cost savings targets through 2024 and we have been identifying savings across our technology services. This was our main focus for the first quarter of the year. It has been a challenging, but ultimately rewarding exercise and informed more discovery into how we weave better financial monitoring, ongoing reconfiguration (on the fly) as our ‘new normal’ - essentially a more ‘FinOps’ approach to service delivery.

Though we end the year in a slightly better space, it is worth recognising the toll felt across the team as we lost some really good people through voluntary redundancy as part of a wider public sector dynamic here.

Security

As always we need to deliver our services safely for our users, and the endlessly changing security landscape kept us on our toes this year. The team met each challenge head on and I am proud of how we ensure our services can evolve, as we sometimes attract attention we do not need or want! Our new Technical Lead is currently looking at better DevSecOps practices that should lift our game even more in 2025.

We also completed optimising some of the services associated with our critical releases, ensuring they are both resilient and responsive for users.

Killing things softly, and launching new services

Related to all of the above, it was great to finally switch (unvalued) services off this year. We worked closely with our business and project colleagues engaging, communicating, and wrangling technical decommissioning of some legacy systems including the Open Data API and .Stat v5. It is good to act when use cases are no longer pertinent or indeed can be absorbed by other, better services. There are more services on our ‘hitlist‘ in 2025 that we will hopefully sunset too 🙂.

On the flip side we were delighted to release Aotearoa Data Explorer (ADE) which is a big part of our Stats NZ future, as a consolidating service that is more interoperable, and user-friendly. ADE went live midway through the year and we are looking forward to some big releases in early 2025 to improve the service and associate processes so we meet customer needs better, faster.

We released the Summaries tool recently, to coincide with the last of the major Census 2023 releases. Users can query via this handy data visualisation tool. We have received lots of great feedback about the new service, and look forward to further continuous improvement through 2025.

Strategy and delivery

Work earlier in the year formulating strategy for our service line was paused, as the extent of wider organisational change in progress became apparent. It made sense to park that work and wait while that worked its way through.

However, this gave us the opportunity to look at things at a higher level, and subsequently a lot of this work was reused to inform a Senior Leadership Team strategy day for Technology Services itself. The day turned out to be really valuable; I am working on assimilating insights derived from it in early 2025 with a view to having our strategy, missions etc. sorted for February.

He tangata / the people

We are constantly looking ahead in terms of what we need to deliver now and into the medium term.

He aha te mea nui o te ao
What is the most important thing in the world?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata
It is the people, it is the people, it is the people
Māori Proverb

It has been great to welcome to the team a new Technical Lead and a new Delivery Manager, getting us into a better place with ADE and migrating away from legacy services such as Infoshare finally.

I am also looking at our service line design; as we move away from ‘on-prem’ setups to cloud based services. It is clear that we need new skills profiles that will call for both new people in the future, and also structured training plans, which we have initiated£ through 2025.

Containerisation piece

2025 will start with us setting up some new squads across the service line, and a big piece around moving to a containerised deployment methodology, working with a vendor partner through January. This piece of work has lots of benefits and will set us up well for the future, vastly improving time to release, baking in security by design etc. - but more on that later!

Other big wins

It’s been a great year and beyond the bigger pieces of work outlined above the team have been busy with other cool stuff like:

• Co-pilot for github pilot - “Oh aye, AI” as they say!…this went really well and we currently plan further roll out
• Moving our website to AWS, taking advantage of scalability and some cost benefits
• A more refined, aligned Certification and Accreditation process (ok, not so cool!)
• Migrating teams into better ADO set ups meaning more efficient release processes
• Reviewing commercial and strategic support arrangements
• Te tiriti review for first time
• Upgrading core critical systems (after technical discovery pieces)

The rest

• The recent announcement by GCDO around a Service Modernisation Roadamp is encouraging and hopefully gets the funding, skillsets and political capital it needs to really move things forward here in 2025

• Related, and mentioned elsewhere - the digital infrastructure idea - im really keen to see if this gets traction in NZ and where it goes. It has been a no brainer for many years now and hopefully now, is a time for it to shine - some great people pushing for this locally.

The play

My favourite albums of 2024

• The Cure: Songs from a Lost World - mentioned this one before, but special to hear new stuff from them
• Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft - I started listening to this in December and very interesting, some great songs..and sounds.
• Van Houten: The Tallest Room - On heavy rotation through start of this year!
• Sack: Wake Up People! - great Irish band return with rather fab album.
• Fontaines DC: Romance - really enjoying their stuff and hoping to see them in Auckland in March.
• Fionn Regan: O Avalanche - lovely wistful songs here.
• Underworld: Strawberry Hotel - Nostalgia inducing album marrying some of their best sounds with brill new stuff.

Podcast

Some of these aren’t necessarily released in 24 - but my date of discovery!

• Guardian football weekly - pretty lighthearted review of all things English Premiership.
• Fantasy 606 - even more lighthearted for those of us who plough the path of fantasy football frustration.
• Quiet Riot - connected into this in the aftermath of happenings in Syria.
• The Rest is Politics - Again, discovered while getting contetn re Syria, but a trove of information framing our wonderful and weird world.
• Tim's listening party - an oldie but goldie; love the premise, the style and substance 🙂. [5]
• Empire - the whole thing..been dipping into this throughout the year.

Books

I am notoriously slow at reading books tbf - so not much to choose from, and i’ve realised i need to explore other genres in 2025 beyond non-fiction!

• Overreach
• Night of Fire
• Platformland
• Agile Communications

Shows/movies

• I found the Milli Vanilli story unexpectedly compelling!
• Hell or High Water
• The Killer
• Of course, Slow Horses
• Rebel Ridge
• Went into the Kneecap film a sceptic, came out converted!
• Thought All of Us Strangers a beautiful film on many levels.

Have a great break all and a happy new year for 2025! sin e an scéal (that’s the story)😀.

Laters.