Award winning innovation
At Hunter Group, we delight in helping our clients to succeed. Here’s our summary of an engagement we undertook with the Animal Health Board.
The Animal Health Board is responsible for the eradication of bovine tuberculosis in New Zealand. Bovine tuberculosis is a highly infectious disease that poses a threat to New Zealand’s meat exports. The major carriers of bovine tuberculosis in New Zealand are introduced wild animals, in particular possums and stoats.
The Animal Health Board had built up considerable understanding of the incidence, distribution, and control of the disease, and in the early 2000’s a new board and senior management team began to take a more proactive approach to disease management and eradication.
Over 2004 - 2009 Hunter Group worked with the Animal Health Board on the development and implementation of their first Information Systems Strategic Plan (ISSP) in support of this new approach. The Animal Health Board determined that it needed
to deploy what was then leading edge web, hand-held, and geospatial information technology.
As well as developing these new systems the Animal Health Board wanted to create its own capability to manage and develop this technology going forward, from the board down.
Hunter Group provided the project managers for all the key projects in the implementation work programme. We led a range of design and development project teams, including the development and use of a leading edge methodology for the software design. We also worked closely with internal business analysts to ensure the Animal Health Board’s scope and objectives were well reflected in the high level functions and features of the final software. The final key project of the work programme was to develop ‘VectorNet’, a web-based system to assist the Animal Health Board and its contractors to plan and execute activities to control the carriers of bovine tuberculosis.
In 2008 the success of the VectorNet project was recognised in New Zealand’s premier ICT
awards, the New Zealand Computerworld Awards. The Animal Health Board won both the Overall Award for the Excellence in the Use of ICT, as well as the Award for the Most Innovative Use of ICT.
The project was notable for the level of engagement with staff and senior management of the Animal Health Board. The software development methodology was derived from leading methodologies and designed in collaboration with project senior personnel to fit the Animal Health Board’s expectations of software delivery as well as its appetite for risk. The resulting solution, incorporating geospatial technologies, is deployed to web browsers and handheld devices used in the field. It also provides data to a geospatial data warehouse for on-going analysis and planning around the incidence, distribution, and control of bovine tuberculosis.