Strategic framework
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Vision
The Digital Technologies ITP has the following vision:
The world looks to Aotearoa New Zealand as a leader in ethical, innovative, inclusive and sustainable digital technologies.
These technologies enable our economy to prosper, help our businesses to grow stronger and compete internationally, and contribute to the wellbeing of all New Zealanders.
This ITP outlines the roadmap for growing the digital technologies sector in the long term. It is closely aligned with the government’s overall economic strategy for building a high wage, low emissions economy. The ITP contributes to the growth pillar of the DSA, which aims to secure Aotearoa New Zealand’s place as a world-leading, trusted, thriving digital nation.
The transformation will occur at 2 levels:
- Economic level: By accelerating growth of our digital sector, the ITP helps to transform Aotearoa New Zealand towards having a more diversified, lower emissions, higher wage economy, as well as raising the value of our export profile, and helping address New Zealand’s long-term productivity challenge.
- Industry-level: Transforming the digital sector itself will help to make it more diverse and inclusive, promoting shared benefits from the growth of the sector through wages.
This ITP fosters a partnership between business, workers, Māori, local communities and government, to jointly strive towards the creation of a more resilient economy.
Development of This ITP
This plan updates the draft released in February 2022 for consultation. It responds to the excellent feedback received, confirms focus areas that have been funded and includes other initiatives that industry, in partnership with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and other agencies are working to advance. A summary of key feedback from consultation can be found in Appendix 2.
Appendix 2: summary of consultation feedback
This ITP will remain a living document, given the pace of change in the industry, the ongoing need to ensure that our efforts are targeting the right areas, and emerging opportunities and challenges. Periodically, MBIE will refresh the document to communicate the latest developments on how government and industry can work together to support sustainable sector growth and resilience.
The draft ITP identified 7 workstreams. The initial allocation of $5 million in Budget 2020 allowed for the development of a number of initiatives, including the creation of a SaaS community, preparation of the 'Digital Skills and Talent Plan', and development of a New Zealand tech story.
Following stakeholder feedback, the outcomes of Budget 2022, and the level of resources available to government and industry, this ITP has prioritised the work into Immediate focus areas and Future focus areas.
Focus areas of this ITP
There are 4 Immediate focus areas in this ITP:
- Growing export success;
- Telling our tech story;
- Enhancing the skills and talent pipeline; and
- Enriching Māori inclusion and enterprise.
These have been identified as the areas that are:
- gaining momentum after receiving support in Budget 2022;
- in focus for the Government as priorities at the moment; and/or
- catalytic for sector growth and sustainability.
Subsequent sections explore the work underway in these focus areas in more detail.
The Future focus area's section explores the potential scope of work areas to further develop in the future, on data-driven innovation, artificial Intelligence (AI) and government procurement.
How do we think about diversity and inclusion in the ITP?
The theme of diversity and inclusion is cross-cutting and applies across the focus areas. There is a lack of diversity in the digital technologies sector. Those who are not proportionally represented in the sector’s businesses or workforce include women, Māori, Pacific peoples, people with disabilities and the neurodiverse.
In addition to efforts to support digital technology businesses to innovate and increase productivity, we also want to improve the diversity of the sector’s workforce and businesses. To ensure the digital technologies sector can reach its full potential, it is important to recognise currently under-represented groups bring distinct skill sets and perspectives that can contribute to building a thriving industry. In addition, the proportion of the workforce that is Māori and Pacific is growing and it is critical that they see digital technologies and related jobs as their future.
Government and industry will continue to take action to better support people from these groups. Diversity and inclusion are important considerations for the work underway in this ITP. For example, the Domestic tech story encourages the development of campaigns to showcase digital technology careers and opportunities to a wider audience. The Enhancing skills and talent pipeline focus area explores building a more diverse workforce and promoting workplaces that are safe and inclusive of diversity.
The Enriching Māori inclusion and Enterprise focus area explores initiatives to support Māori participation in the sector and what are often termed “by Māori, for Māori” approaches, which will also benefit others in the sector. Work towards a thriving and equitable digital future for Aotearoa provides an unprecedented opportunity to realise the aspirations for tāngata whenua and Te Tiriti o Waitangi / the Treaty of Waitangi in the digital era, both collectively and as individuals.
Alongside a Māori focus, the ITP will increasingly from 2023 take a Pasifika focus, as Tangata o le Moana, with the aim of increasing Pacific peoples’ participation, and nurturing their business potential and growth, in the digital technologies sector. While there is a special relationship between Māori and Pacific people, different approaches are required to reflect Pacific values, context, and recognise the needs and aspirations of Pacific people.
We will continue to partner with communities to determine what support would best help, and ensure work programmes reflect the needs of the diversity and inclusion of a wide range of people. The ITP will explore opportunities that build off emerging innovation already being driven by leading industry players from diverse backgrounds.
What does success look like?
It is important to measure and evaluate the outcomes of the initiatives outlined in this ITP. However, within some areas of the digital technologies sector, there is a lack of timely, accurate and fit-for-purpose data.
Throughout the focus area sections in this document, we have identified example success factors we can use to track progress towards achieving our vision. Where applicable, we will leverage off other measurement frameworks, for example, the DSA identifies several measures of success to assess progress against its vision. Of most importance to this ITP are the DSA measures relating to growth.
We will also continue to work with industry and other stakeholders to develop better metrics and indicators for tracking progress and the way we collect data on the sector.
Growth success measures in the DSA include:
- Digital & ICT exports are on track to becoming New Zealand’s leading export earner.
- All New Zealand businesses are born digital, and supported to adopt the digital tools that work for them.
- The digital sector employs more than 10% of the New Zealand workforce in high value jobs.