Gen-i to get NZITO admin help online

By ADAM GIFFORD

Systems integrator and application developer Gen-i is getting a chance to prove the reusability of the Jade programming environment through a $200,000 contract it has won to take the New Zealand Industry Training Organisation's administration support online.

Project delivery manager Brendon Williams said NZITO was licensing an application Gen-i built for the Agriculture ITO and getting it modified for its requirements.

While Agriculture ITO's system is used by field officers who go out to farms to talk to one or two trainees at a time, NZITO, which co-ordinates training for the dairy and meat industries, works closely with the human resources staff of companies such as Fonterra and Affco to determine the training needs of employees.

For the Agriculture ITO, Gen-i developed replication technology so each field officer could carry a copy of the application and keep it synchronised with the central database.

"What we are doing now is developing a web interface, so NZITO has only one copy, and users interact with the system through the internet," Williams said. "At the moment all this sort of work is done on paper."

Williams said the object-oriented nature of Jade meant components of the application could be modified or developed quickly and cost effectively.

Gen-i aims to have the NZITO system live in early January. It will be hosted at TelstraClear's Hamilton data centre. NZITO general manager Carl Ammon said his organisation had only seven staff, but co-ordinated the activities of more than 200 contract trainers and 10,000 trainees.

"We are brokers. We identify the people who need training, put them together with the trainers, monitor the service and report the results to the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, which sets the unit standards."

He said the new system would help streamline the process and allow NZITO to aggregate demand, so trainers could be used more efficiently.

The system will capture information about the trainee, his or her qualifications, and results.

"Using the web interface our major users can access this information and update their own HR records without the need for double-entry."

Once the administration system was online NZITO would work with Gen-i on an online training system.

Gen-i Ventures software solutions manager Cherry Vanderbeke said Gen-i was trying to sell the system to other industry training organisations.

If that happened, Agriculture ITO would get a licence fee for the base application and NZITO would pick up a fee for any reuse of the web enhancements developed for it.

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