From Hospital Wards to the Digital Marae

Where It Started

I grew up at Te Aroha Paa marae in south Taranaki. Sunday dinners packed with grandparents, uncles, aunties, and a swarm of cuzzies. That marae shaped how I think about technology — tools should serve the collective, not the other way around.

Twenty years of enterprise IT followed. National data centre infrastructure at Revera, trusted by 200+ government and private sector organisations. Running technology at Rugby World Cup 2011 venues. Managing teams across Asia Pacific for Unisys. Project lead for NZ Police, Ministry of Health, and Statistics NZ — where we delivered the country’s first online Census.

The Hospital That Changed Everything

The work that defined everything came next: ICT Service Delivery Manager at Whanganui District Health Board. A hospital is unforgiving. Systems fail, clinicians miss calls, patients wait. You learn very quickly that technology has to work — not 99% of the time, all of the time.

When COVID hit in 2020, we had about three days to figure it out. We deployed Windows Virtual Desktop across the hospital so staff could work from home without hardware delays. We stood up Aotearoa’s first Teams-based telehealth service — and made sure every patient got a “tech check” before their appointment so clinicians weren’t wasting consult time troubleshooting someone’s iPad. We ran the COVID-19 Emergency Operations Centre, coordinating across Police, Civil Defence, iwi, and GPs. And somewhere in there, we became the first in Asia Pacific to deploy an AI chatbot directly into Microsoft Teams for hospital staff.

Microsoft featured it on their global Microsoft 365 blog. We were one of two international examples they highlighted. Not bad for a regional DHB in Whanganui.

Why Aotearoa Communities Get Left Behind

The thing I kept noticing through all of it: big organisations had budgets and consultants to absorb change. The corner dairy, the local marae, the small iwi trust — they were getting left behind. Not because the tools didn’t exist, but because nobody was making them accessible or affordable.

That’s the gap RED SKY 365 sits in. The same tools that kept a hospital running during a pandemic can help a community organisation run their meetings, a small business understand their data, or a marae teach te reo Māori through a card game. The technology isn’t exotic. What’s different is understanding how these organisations actually work — what matters to them, how decisions get made, what “success” looks like when you’re not a corporate.

Coming Home to the Marae

I went back to Te Aroha Paa. Ran a 12-week horticulture programme there with a local training partner. Ran ICT programmes on the marae with MSD — sitting on couches, drinking tea, learning together the way we do things. Four graduates went straight into tech careers. The marae’s now on Microsoft 365.

Red sky at night. We’re optimistic about what’s ahead for Aotearoa organisations that get this right. The question is whether you get ahead of it or get caught flat-footed.

We’re here to help with the former.