Jonathan Southee: Okay, going back a little way after I finished studying, I actually went over to Australia, like I think a lot of Kiwis do, and I was fortunate to land a job at Coca-Cola Amatil.
I spent about 10 years there, and I think I really benefited from spending a lot of time in a large company. There was a really wide range of work to get onto a lot of good networking opportunities and people to meet and people to learn from.
But I kind of found my way into the SAP program, which I didn’t know would be such hard work at the time, but it was a fantastic opportunity, and I learned a lot from a lot of great leaders and people that were on that program.
And once we got through doing that, after quite a few years, that’s when I really got my opportunity to move into kind of more digital and technology innovation, so into e-commerce, which was new at the time, and feels old.
And I feel old saying it, we got into image recognition. We were the first bottler in the world to do that, working with a small startup out of Israel and Singapore, which has gone on to become a unicorn.
And we did some really revolutionary things for Field Sales and call centers at the time, which are probably quite boring and commonplace now, but felt like I really got got a hold of it, and really had the first opportunity for technology to make a difference in an organisation like that.
I moved in, back to New Zealand, coming up 10 years ago now, and started working in with Kiwi Wealth in their digital program, and launched the first digital identity for KiwiSaver in New Zealand, which was really, really exciting again at the time, And is sort of feels quite commonplace now, and often technology just moves on like that and but then so I moved on from there and went to New Zealand Trade & Enterprise, which was my kind of first foray into the public sector, but also my first foray into working with like a truly global business.
So we had 50 sites around the world working with New Zealand exporters to take them to the world, which was just just an amazing reason to come to work every day. Really uplifting hearing about how we could help New Zealand businesses go international.
More recently, I then took on the role of CIO at New Zealand Parliament through the 2023 election. I actually had the joy of having three prime ministers in one year.
In 2023 the election was the last one, and is still the current one in the year parliament is like, like nothing I’ve ever worked in, and just what those people do every day to make the country function was was a pleasure to be a part of.
And in the last year, I spent it at New Zealand Rugby, which is probably the only organisation covered more by the media than parliament, so that that seems to be a common thread recently. Yeah, and so that’s where we’re up to now.
