ITP Techblog

Here's a quick weekly update from ITP CEO Paul Matthews

Wow, what an absolutely amazing few days at ITx Rutherford 2019 in Nelson.

Our speakers have all been brilliant and as always, the thing that's really made ITx special to me is the people who came. A really excellent mix of people across the tech sector (and elsewhere), and primarily those who care about professional practice in tech.

Attendees came from right across New Zealand and in fact the world - with folks travelling from Australia, South Africa, India and elsewhere to be here. It was great to see so many come together around the themes of Innovation, Technology and Education.

Many of the sessions were recorded and will be available in the ITP Video Library over the coming weeks, free for ITP members. If you're not a member, join now and you'll have full and free access to these, plus the screed of other member benefits. Attendees will also have access to slides shortly.

I ran a session on CITPNZ and CTech, and looking at the reason we put these certifications in place originally (and now). It was great to see so much support for what we're trying to achieve through this and other initiatives - lifting the status of tech to a profession. For this to happen we need a commitment to professional standards and accountabiity for those who aren't prepared to do things properly.

Every day we hear about those in our sector cutting corners and not following good practice with often catastrophic consequences. And it has to stop.

A couple of examples I talked about were the recent breaches at the Ministry of Culture and Heritage (where a contractor didn't take basic precautions to protect users' highly sensitive data on a website), a laptop at the Commerce Commission stolen with sensitive data and again, without even basic password protection in place, and many more.

Come on people - as an industry, we know better than that. There is basically no excuse for this and many of the other corner cutting we see day in day out, often with real victims. It's simply not good enough and we'll be taking more of a stand on this in future, as a community.

Anyway, I digress. ITx Rutherford was a massive success. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and it was so good meeting so many of our members and others amongst the hundreds who attended. We'll put out a bunch of photos and other things on our Facebook page over the coming week.

And now I'm off home for a night then off to Seoul in Korea to talk with APEC, along with representatives from a number of other Asia Pacific countries, about implementing common skills frameworks across the 21 APEC member countries. This is a huge opportunity for our region with some great potential spin-off benefits as well, such as increased recognition for CITPNZ and CTech.

So if you were at ITx Rutherford, safe travels home. And if not, hope to see you there next year!