Fleur Tytheridge had no intention of moving to New Zealand, but when she came out from the UK to her brother’s wedding, she loved the place and it has been her home for the last 15 years.
“The family came over for his wedding, travelled for a month or so, and I just loved it. I’d done six years in my previous job and fell in love with the New Zealand lifestyle, so I came over for six to 12 months on a working holiday visa and have never left.”
Tytheridge’s background in the UK was in IT, as a manager working with the National Health Service. That experience set the direction for a career she continued in New Zealand, moving tangentially from IT into sales and marketing roles across a diverse portfolio of industries, then more recently into strategic consulting.
One of those industries was in civil infrastructure, providing asset management and maintenance technology solutions to NZ Transport Agency, local government authorities, and their contractors.
This led to an engagement and interest with IPWEA, most recently culminating in her election as the incoming IPWEA Vice President. In this role she can also leverage her passion for governance, heightened through her Executive MBA program at Massey University completed in 2021.
Tytheridge is the founder of Tarquin Consultancy, providing professional services across governance and strategy, sales and marketing, and technology adoption and scale. She is also a founding partner of consultancy Atratus, which focuses on three core domains of AI and digital transformation, data governance and security, and Workday.
“I’m the only non-engineer currently on the IPWEA board, so for me it is more a commercial and diverse lens that I bring to the table, along with my understanding of technology and how it impacts the way we work,” she said.
“I look at strategy in a different way, particularly with scaling up and international expansion, both through a technology lens and from a sales and marketing perspective. I think about how to go-to-market or expand an audience, not just with what we offer but how we offer it.”
Tytheridge’s contact with asset managers also inspired respect for the work they do, and the way in which well planned infrastructure serves communities.
“Many people don’t stop to think what it takes to design, build and operate our infrastructure, they take so much of it for granted,” she said.
“But they serve a vital purpose in connecting our communities and how we interact and live within them. The societal impact of what they do is really important, which really resonated with me and my desire to contribute to purpose-led organisations.”
It was a direction which led her not just to IPWEA but also to the Auckland Coastguard, where she is an independent director for New Zealand’s largest coastguard unit, supporting those who save lives on the water through governance .
With technology disrupting all industries and markets, Tytheridge sees the impact it is having on asset managers, and on the communities they serve.
She cites an example in China, where 157 kilometres of highway was built entirely with technology.
“Humans were of course involved, but when it came to the actual build it was done entirely by AI-powered drones and robots,” said Tytheridge.
“The humans were making sure that it all went to plan, so there was still a role for them, but they didn’t do any of the actual construction. China is leaping ahead with a lot of this technology, but it’ll make its way to Australia and New Zealand too.”
Technology enables asset management to shift from reactive to proactive and predictive, which is a game changer.
“With predictive maintenance, which uses a combination of technologies including AI, sensors, machine learning and digital twins, you can start analysing and forecasting based on historical and real-time data, and understand how much something is going to cost over its useful life, and when to intervene.
“I’m excited to see the development of this area in asset management, and how data driven decisions can really make an impact.”
Tytheridge notes the recent NZ$70 million commitment from the New Zealand Government to drive research and development in the area of artificial intelligence, to be delivered through the newly established New Zealand Institute for Advanced Technology.
“This is a great initiative and a way to build some momentum with innovation, especially for the AECO sector which I’m seeing as a key focus through my work and the wider AI community such as the AI Forum in New Zealand,” she said.
