Celebrating 20 years of #makingworkbetter

This month marks 20 years since Directors Sarah Heal and Grant Margison founded Information Leadership, believing there were better ways of delivering information management projects.

Before Information Leadership was formed, Grant and Sarah wrote ‘Flapping to Flying: Getting Value not Grief from Information Technology” together. This articulated much of their thinking and described a number of models that continue to underpin our thinking at Information Leadership today.

“It was our sense that maybe even we could make a difference in how information is managed at different organisations like councils and agencies that actually play a major role in having a civil and fair society.”  - Grant Margison

With a team of 10 (6 of whom are still with the company) Information Leadership was well placed to take advantage of SharePoints rising popularity in 2007 – pioneering it’s use for serious document and records management in New Zealand.

Since then, the company has gone from strength to strength, expanding beyond the original Christchurch office to Wellington (2011), Auckland (2019) and Dunedin (2021) with a team of almost 70 staff.

The introduction of iWorkplace marked another significant step in IL’s journey and today serves over 100 customers nationwide.  iWorkplace supports organisations to manage scale and complexity with a series of solutions, design patterns, apps and frameworks that transform how work gets done with Microsoft 365.

Looking to the future, Sarah and Grant are not resting on their laurels. “When owners have been in business for 20 years, it can be easy to get tired of it and want to move on” says Sarah, “that couldn’t be further from the truth for Grant and me. We want to build this next chapter of IL and we’re doing that with a great team of people around us.”