SIBA (NZ) Chairman’s Report September 2014

Introduction

May of this year marked 5 years since the foundation of SIBA (NZ).  The organisation has grown over this period to 20 members ranging from large multi-nationals, based or working in NZ, to small businesses and from long-established organisations to those who have only recently come into being. Throughout this 5 year period, SIBA (NZ) has been committed to growing the spatial industry for the benefit of its members and in support of this we currently have 4 main areas of focus as follows:

•  Awareness

• Capability

• Collaboration

• Advocacy

The last 12 months have been a particularly busy time with activities across all of these areas.

Our Work

The recipe for growing the spatial sector has several key ingredients: the first of these being Awareness. In order to raise awareness of both the value which spatial can bring to an organisation as well as of SIBA itself, we have put a significant amount of effort into working in this area. Our strategy has been both to “go to them” through attending external industry events; as well as hosting smaller scale events of our own to bring the spatial community and others together. This year we consciously upped our profile with 2 SIBA Business Breakfasts in Auckland and Wellington drawing around 100 attendees, several presentations to Industry groups as well as having a presence at 2 major GIS Events – the Esri & Intergraph User Conferences (at these latter 2 we provided a very vital ingredient to almost all spatial events: caffeine!)

We have been continuing our work to ensure that the NZ Spatial Industry has the skills Capability to meet the demand both now and going forward. This has involved both liaising with Tertiary Education Establishments and also providing feedback to the Government on the proposed Tertiary Education Strategy. Alongside this longer term work to establish a domestic capability, we continue to work with other organisations such as Immigration NZ and NZ Tech to target skilled overseas migrants including at the huge SXSW Tech Event in the US earlier this year.

Collaboration is an ongoing activity and we have made significant progress in working more closely with our “neighbours” in the spatial sector including the newly formed NZIS Spatial Stream, the Consulting Surveyors of NZ, LINZ and NZ Tech. This has brought about opportunities for members such as having staff participating in Professional Development programmes run by NZIS.

We continue to act as the voice of our members – whether large or small – if there is a genuine need to lobby external bodies on key issues. This Advocacy has led to SIBA May of this year marked 5 years since the foundation of SIBA (NZ). The requesting changes to procurement instances which we felt were either unfair to our members or which would not lead to the best outcomes for the agency involved. In such instances it is a significantly more powerful medium than a single voice.

Underlying all of the above we have been improving our Communications – this is vitally important as it allows us to fulfil 3 key outputs:

We feel we have significantly improved this area through the new SIBA (NZ) website, increased social media presence and working with SIBA Australia on shared content and channels. However this, like so much of our activity, is an ongoing work in progress and we welcome feedback from you on how to communicate with you and with the wider audiences, more effectively.

One of the major initiatives for Spatial in NZ, and one that SIBA has been a foundation supporter of, is the inaugural NZ Spatial Excellence Awards. This is a significant event which cuts across many of our key areas including raising awareness and collaborating with other stakeholders: LINZ and NZIS. We are extremely pleased at the level of support of the awards with almost 100 entries and the Awards Dinner itself selling out fast. We want to make the event not just about the Spatial Industry celebrating its own success but showcasing this to others and promoting the excellent work of our members and their staff. 

Financially we are strong with steady membership revenue and sufficient income to support initiatives such as the NZSEA with seed funding. There are also significant reserves – allowing us to review more significant projects down the track if the need arises.

Looking Forward

I believe the next 12-month period is going to be even busier and more exciting for us and while our core focus remains the same we need to ensure that we deliver relevant outcomes for our members. To this end we are going to be consulting with all of you via an online questionnaire on the top strategic priorities for our work going forward.

At a tactical level we will be reviewing a number of our systems including CRM and Document Management to ensure that we can be as efficient in our operations as possible.

We will, as always, face challenges going forward. Some of these are those that we face as an industry, such as: How to communicate internally and externally more effectively? How do we improve poor procurement situations which we as the private sector often bear the brunt of in terms of time and money? How do we define the lines of who does what between the Government and the Private Sector? How do we walk the fine line between being consulted and giving free consulting? How do we collectively make Spatial Business Succeed in NZ?

Several of these relate to our relationship with Government and I believe that the government has a role to play in both the strategy and the individual initiatives for growing spatial. The NZ Geospatial Office is the government body responsible for delivering the NZ Spatial Strategy, however to date this has not been the success we had hoped for with distractions taking their focus from the key areas. The office is becoming increasingly outward facing which we welcome, however the pace of change may not be rapid enough to keep up with the demands of the outside world and the office risks increasing irrelevancy. Within LINZ itself there continues to be the challenge of identifying the line between Government and Private sector including in the areas of data, consulting and services and so we work to define this even if this means agreeing to disagree.

Other challenges are those faced by us as an organisation and the one area which we are currently reviewing is our membership structure including the fees and types. Increasingly Spatial Technology is growing from a purely Geo-Centric model to a Geo-Enabled model and this change is reflected in the organisations who are now significant users and creators of spatial and is added to with questions around the membership of multi-nationals with NZ operations, the increasing role of tech start-ups and small consultancy practices. I believe therefore that it is a good time to review our membership practices to ensure that we are as relevant and representative of the industry as we can be without watering down the key focus of growing spatial industry.

While we certainly can’t anticipate all of the challenges that we will face, let alone have answers for them – I am confident that we have the drive, the team and the resources to address the major ones as we move forward.

Conclusion

At the end of my first term as Chair of SIBA (NZ) I would like to thank you all for your support as members. I also want to recognise the hard work done by the individual executive members and for their employers in allowing them to make a full contribution to the Association. When I first joined the SIBA executive, I was really heartened to see the work being done collaboratively by members. These were members who compete in the commercial world but who collectively see the benefit in working together for the greater good of the sector. And this I believe is both unique and very valuable for all of our businesses.

I have valued my first term as chair and look forward to working with you over the next 12 months to drive Spatial Business forward in NZ.

Thank you.

Scott Campbell

16 September 2014