ITP Techblog

Kia ora koutou ITP members and supporters,

If you are a tad older, like me, you might not have dived into the world of TikTok yet. Duncan Grieve of the Spinoff tells us that - Teens have brutally dumped Facebook for TikTok. What does it mean for NZ? With mind-blowing stats on use and incredible insights like “Fully 86% of teen TikTok or Snapchat users say they are on that platform daily and a quarter of teen users for both of these platforms say they are on the site or app almost constantly.” He describes this as a mega trend, Wow. Something for marketing departments from every industry to sit up and take notice of.

Thanks to everyone who has already completed - How do we feel? about where we work. Here are some of the initial insights:

• 28% of us work from home 5 days per week, while 18% work from the office everyday
• In an ideal world 52% of us would prefer to work from home every day
• The weather determines whether 30% of us work from home or the office on a given day
• Generally we feel more relaxed when working from home
• Encouraging others to work from the office on the same day is also really important to us

The top 5 things we care about in the office when we work from there are:

• Excellent Internet Connection
• Good heating / cooling
• Location of the office
• Earthquake strengthened building
• Air Filtering System

I was slightly surprised to find the 3 least important things an employer can provide are - Pool table / Pinball machine / Toys, Breakfast supplies and Bike storage - these three are seen as really important to many of the “cool” startups and their culture. 

If this topic is of interest to you here is an interview with an organisational behaviour associate professor at Harvard - Back to the Office? Stay Remote? Go Hybrid?

This week we are asking - How you feel? about your current job. Newsroom posed the hypothesis workers are regretting quitting their jobs finding the grass is not in fact greener on the other side.

How do you feel? Please fill the survey in and let us know. Also please pass the survey links onto your friends and colleagues who work in this fabulous industry. Enjoy the last few days of August folks! Hei kōna rā (farewell) Vic.

How Many Days a week do we work from home?

Re-connecting the public service: Openness and data sharing during the COVID-19 pandemic

Chapter 14 of From Yesterday to Tomorrow is a really interesting academic study on the history leading to the creation of the Statistics NZ Data Portal - Re-connecting the public service: Openness and data sharing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To be honest the NZ Data Portal is something that surprisingly completely passed me by, so I found this chapter really interesting. In the author Dr Jon MacKay's own words

“This chapter is split into two parts:

• In the first part, I briefly outline some of the major changes that have been made to improve the way that the public service creates and delivers policy.
• The second part details the growth and development of the COVID-19 data portal and explains the process by which the portal became a clearinghouse facilitated by Stats NZ for public and private information during early days of the COVID-19 global pandemic.”

Dr MacKay also provides us with a history of open data in New Zealand, the impact of the Official Information Act on gaining access to data and some of the more technical aspects of data driven decision making. If you work for the public service or in the data space this is a chapter for you.

Finally, I mentioned last week my interest in streaming platforms, well the wonderful team at Clare Capital included some great insights in their latest investor update. The big surprise for me here is how few of us utilise TVNZ On Demand, as a person who doesn't watch old school TV I love the content our national broadcaster offer on their streaming platform - so if you haven't discovered TVNZ On Demand yet I encourage you to check it out. Source: Clare Capital Tech Insights.