Stories by Brad Howarth

The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement has proven to be both a godsend for workers and a nightmare for CIOs, especially when it comes to securing the data they carry.

The ever-improving realism of cinematic visual effects and animation hasn’t come without a price, with both the volume of effects work and the tight studio budgets pushing post production companies to look for savings everywhere they can.

Natural disasters, bring-your-own (BYO) computing and the overall familiarity that many organisations now have with virtualization has generated a groundswell of activity, with CIOs seeing desktop virtualization as a means to reassert their authority over the end-points in their business.

Escott is the head of Harvey Norman Big Buys, an online retail store created by Harvey Norman and launched in late March this year.

A second technology making a significant impact on solving Big Data problems is in-memory computing, which takes workloads that were traditionally resident on disk-based storage and moves them into main memory. This delivers a performance improvement many times above that which has been possible previously.

According to IDC’s Digital Universe report the data created globally on an annual basis will leap from 1.2 zettabytes this year to 35 zettabytes in 2020 (one zettabyte is equal to one billion terabytes).

Customer-focused mobile implementations are more likely to be driven by marketing than IT. But cluey CIOs are beginning to understand the power of aligning external and internal strategies.

Customer-focused mobile implementations are more likely to be driven by marketing than IT. But cluey CIOs are beginning to understand the power of aligning external and internal strategies.

Customer-focused mobile implementations are more likely to be driven by marketing than IT. But cluey CIOs are beginning to understand the power of aligning external and internal strategies.

The path to shared services is rarely smooth sailing.

The role of shared services can often be broken into two layers. The first is the infrastructure layer — the data centres, networks and desktop infrastructure, and some of the more basic generic services. The second is the complex applications that run across the first layer — services such as human resources, payroll, and some financial activities such as fleet management. Different governments have taken different approaches.

The deployment of shared services has something of a mixed history in public sector organisations in Australia. The notion of pooling IT services from multiple government departments and agencies into a single operation appears to hold great benefits, from both a cost and service delivery perspective. But history has shown that such efforts can quickly be derailed by the complexity of the tasks they are trying to consolidate — especially when the motivation for consolidation slides too far towards cost recovery as opposed to providing excellent service to the agencies involved.

It is just on 10 years since Salesforce.com unveiled the first preview of its customisable online customer relationship management (CRM) software at the annual DEMO conference in California. DEMO had previously been the launch platform for ground-breaking technology such as Netscape Navigator, Sun’s Java and Adobe Acrobat, but attendees in February 2001 would have had little idea that they were witnessing something that would turn the world of customer management software — and enterprise software generally — on its head.

There are strong economic and business performance arguments driving the desire to see more women enter the IT workforce. The diversity and workforce lead for IBM Australia and New Zealand, Belinda Curtis, points to several studies demonstrating stronger corporate performance when women represent a high proportion of senior leadership or board positions.

Like most Year 10 girls, Rebekah Eden never planned on a career in the IT industry. Popular culture had conditioned her to believe that IT was all about lonely individuals hunched over computers for hours and hours on end. Instead, her studies were taking her towards a preferred career in forensic science. It was exposure to the industry through a week-long EXITE (Exploring Interest in Technology and Engineering) camp organised by IBM that changed her mind. During that week she was shown different aspects of the IT industry, from programming robots to developing websites. The experience completely changed her mind.