Masters, Ivor

Ivor Masters
General Manager, New Zealand Post

Ivor's early career years were involved in accounting, which then evolved into many business disciplines. He has had senior management roles in a variety of companies in England, South Africa and New Zealand. Working for multinational companies such as Shell, Bell & Howell and Burmah Castrol as well as New Zealand’s Postal administration. With nearly 30 years experience in business Ivor has a clear understanding of business processes . His roles included Financial Controller, Marketing Manager, Planning Manager, and IT General Manager as well as others.

Ivor has become an expert in the shared service arena creating a shared services company at New Zealand Post. This company was created to support the concept of the ‘one company’ approach to the delivery of “shared services”, within the New Zealand Post Group. ‘Shared services’ are viewed as services and activities, delivered within NZ Post, that are used by more than one company or business area. As Information technology was rapidly changing; it had to meet business opportunities under the direction for flexible, proven IT solutions. The focus being on managing the day to day operational and delivery activity of shared systems and services, and providing the response to business initiatives. At the same time meeting the Company needs in the most common and cost effective way. The governance being that it was important that the various companies and business groups still “owned” the strategies and directions of their systems and if required, are able to have a variety of different solutions based on known company wide impacts. The services included were Payroll, Procurement, Accounts payable, Customer management systems, Debt collection, and the IT infrastructure. Each of these responsibilities being managed by Service level Agreements. A user pays model was introduced so that the various companies’ behaviours could be guided to common and most cost effective solutions.