Recently I was invited to speak at the 6^th annual GIS Senior Executive Summit held in Wellington on 9 March. Each year, the summit brings together industry leaders from across the private and public sectors.

The Minister for Land Information, the Hon Minister Williamson, opened the summit. He spoke broadly about geospatial information as one of the key future trends and pointed out its economic benefit to New Zealand. We are very fortunate to have a Minister who is very passionate about technology and the power of spatial information and who committed to communicating that to others.

Consistent with our Minister's (and the Government's) priorities I focused on the New Zealand Geospatial Strategy, specifically:

• LINZ's role in supporting and executing that strategy, and what we have achieved so far
• the role of the New Zealand Geospatial Office, particularly in creating a national spatial data infrastructure
• the steps our Customer Services group is taking to provide more accurate and timely spatial data
• the need for government and private sector to work together
• how LINZ is supporting GIS capability and research.

And finally ESRI founder, Jack Dangermond, gave the keynote speech about the potential of spatial information in design, for example dynamic and interactive ways of designing infrastructure. I greatly enjoyed Jack's presentation. He extended my thinking about the potential of spatial information and provided a great insight into a possible future direction. It was encouraging to have Jack acknowledge and support the direction our Geospatial Strategy was taking.

You can read my speech on the LINZ website.

Sue Gordon

General Manager Strategic Development and Support
Land Information New Zealand