Insights
Notes on running technology well: how we work, what goes wrong in New Zealand businesses, and what we have learned putting systems in and then living with them.
AI that acts, not just answers
An assistant that drafts is one thing. An agent that sends the email, updates the record or raises the purchase order is another, and the question stops being whether its output is good and becomes what it is allowed to do on its own.
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An alarm nobody answers is not monitoring
Sensors are the easy part of an IoT project. What decides whether the chiller failure at two in the morning costs a notification or a coolstore of product is who gets told, how, and what they are expected to do about it.
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Guest Wi-Fi is still your network
The visitor network gets set up in ten minutes and forgotten for five years. Meanwhile contractors, personal phones and the odd device nobody can identify end up on it, and it is often closer to the business systems than anyone realises.
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When someone asks for the footage
Sooner or later a staff member, a customer, the police or an insurer asks for a copy of your CCTV. Most systems can export a clip. Far fewer businesses know who is allowed to ask, what they are entitled to, or how long they have to answer.
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Is this a notifiable breach? Making the serious harm call
The Privacy Act asks one judgement of you after an incident: whether the breach is likely to cause serious harm. It is far easier to make well if you worked out how you would make it before anything happened.
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Your first IT hire, or an outsource
We sell the outsource, so here is the case for hiring instead, and the point at which most businesses genuinely need both.
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Write the AI use policy before you choose the AI tools
Your staff are already using it. The only decision still available is whether that happens through something sanctioned with a written position, or through a personal account with client material in it.
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A technology roadmap that survives a budget round
Most roadmaps are a wish list with dates attached. The ones that get funded explain what each item prevents or enables, and what happens if it slips a year.
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Remote first, and what that actually means for a client
Working remotely where the job allows is not a compromise we ask clients to accept. It is how you get the person who is best at your problem rather than the one who is nearest.
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System selection when every vendor demos well
Demonstrations are performed by people who know the software, using data chosen to suit it. Judging a system on one is like judging a car by watching someone else drive it around a car park.
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Incident response starts well before the incident
During a serious incident nobody reads a forty page plan. What gets used is a single page of phone numbers and the first four decisions, agreed while everyone was calm.
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Why everyone still exports to Excel
You implemented an ERP with reporting built in, and the finance team still exports to a spreadsheet every month. That is not resistance to change. It is feedback.
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