ITP Techblog

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

This week we're very sad to report that ITP Past President, Honorary Fellow and genuinely good person Prof Philip Sallis has passed away. There'll be a service to celebrate his life next Tuesday in Auckland.

Also, an update on our work around Workforce Development Councils as part of the wide Review of Vocational Education, and a refresher on the Maker's Schedule to think about heading into the weekend.

ITP Past President Philip Sallis dies  

I'm extremely saddened to have to report that Prof Philip Sallis has passed away after a brief medical battle.

Philip was one of the genuine "good guys", personally and professionally. Academically, he contributed massively to both Otago University and AUT University, latterly as Pro Vice Chancellor. However more than this, he was one of those people who was always keen to pull up sleeves and help however possible.

After working for the DSIR in Wellington back in the 70s, Philip disappeared to the UK for a time and returned with a PhD, and a sufficiently impressive CV to win a chair in Information Science at Otago University.

He went on to become Deputy Vice-chancellor at AUT before resuming research full time, directing a six country collaborative project in Geoinformatics. In more recent years he held the position of Pro Vice Chancellor at AUT, also completing a stint as Head of Department which is when I got to know him more.

Philip was the President of ITP (then NZCS) from 1989 to 1992 and fondly described as "irrepressible" by those who knew him. He's been an Honorary Fellow of ITP since then and even in recent years was a strong supporter of our activities, such as working to ensure wider support for ITP Degree Accreditation when it was becoming established.

A service will be held at 2.00pm on Tuesday 18th February at St Mary's-in-Holy Trinity, 446 Parnell Rd, Auckland. I know there will be a strong contingent of ITP Fellows, Members and others in attendance.

 

RoVE Review and the Workforce Development Council

Just a quick update on this.

We're continuing conversations with both TEC and other industries in relation to the Workforce Development Councils (WDCs, see here).

One of TEC's major concerns with an IT or IT/Engineering WDC is scale - whether this would cover a sufficiently large enough area. While we can debate the merits of this (given the growth in these areas), it is nevertheless a major concern of theirs.

The discussions with TEC have been positive. There's a clear joint intention to get the best outcome and we're confident that a sensible proposal will be given genuine consideration.

Today we wrote to Education Minister Hon Chris Hipkins to propose some changes that would result in a future-focused STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) or STEAM (STEM with Arts) WDC, focused on IT, Engineering and one or both of Business and Creative Arts. We strongly believe this addresses TEC's concerns while ensuring a strong level of commonality between areas.

This letter was co-signed by the largest group of IT and Engineering representative bodies ever to collectively co-sign a proposal. As well as the main tech bodies (ITP, NZTech and NZRise) it includes a host of other bodies such as BioTechNZ and AgriTechNZ, plus Engineering NZ (the professional body of Engineers - used to be called IPENZ) and a host of Engineering industry bodies as well.

It's not the perfect outcome, but we believe it's one that would address most of our industry's concerns while meeting TEC's needs, so we're hoping this will result in a WDC grouping we can all support.

We'll let you know how things progress.

 

The Maker's Schedule

Lastly, I came across a piece we published a few years ago about the "Maker's Schedule" and I thought I'd share it again with our community.

Those who know me know that, like many in our industry, I get a lot of detailed work done at night and I remember reading this post a few years ago. It really put things into context and I think helps explain why devs and others often work best in the small hours.

Take a look - it's interesting.