Alan Chew is an honours graduate in management and a chartered accountant. He started his own IT company, Houston Technology Group, in 1986 and today employs 25 staff in the Waikato/BOP. In his 26 years in business Alan has found that he needs to double the productivity of his team every five to six years. This is because of the relentless drop in revenues caused by decreases in prices of IT hardware, longer product life cycles and innovations that allow clients to do a lot more with less.

His solution was to get his team to become early adopters of new time-saving technologies as soon as they become practical. He therefore set up a specialist technology team that searches the world for cutting age innovations. This team evaluates promising technologies and implements them if practical benefits can be obtained.

Today, HTG is one of the foremost advocates of innovative technologies. Alan spends a lot of his time talking to businesses about how they too can massively improve their productivity by embracing such technologies as digital ink, speech recognition, handwriting recognition and smart scanning.

Alan is also the founder of Houston Medical, a very innovative patient and practice management software, 20 years ago. While he has sold his shares in this business, he retains more than a passing interest in the health sector.