Stories by: David Braue

Whether your company is maintaining physical infrastructure under contract or simply managing field assets as part of an ongoing business, the heightened role of asset management information systems has been well established as part of the CIO’s responsibility.

If you have never considered how much data it takes to keep a toll road running, a brief chat with Barry King may give you pause for thought.

Sometimes, providing the ideal customer service means ditching what you’re doing and simply starting over.

All sorts of businesses are revisiting IT service delivery as traditional internecine rivalries give way to a push towards a future built around a common infrastructure with mutually understood metrics.

One of the Asia-Pacific region’s largest beverage distributors, Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA), maintains an extensive fleet of distributors and manages a complex supply chain that stretches from one side of the country to the other.

Security managers must break down their walled-garden mentalities and integrate security deep into the heart of increasingly flexible, BYO computing-driven IT service management (ITSM) environments or risk data death by a thousand cuts, a systems and security consultant has warned.

It's hardly the kind of thing any company wants attached to its name, but HTC's rapid acknowledgment of confessed "serious" security exploit, discovered and published this week by security researchers, may ultimately help deflect criticisms and will, regardless, serve as a valuable reminder to CSOs that mobile devices represent a new and still-evolving security threat within the enterprise.

Concerned that your employees are being a bit lax when it comes to looking after their laptops? Steal them yourself, one vendor has advised in the wake of yet another damning security report that suggests laptops and other equipment are literally walking out of Australian companies that are still operating at far below world's best practice when it comes to device security.

As if data quality and stockouts weren’t enough of a day-today worry for CIOs, added pressure to serve demanding online customers and keep up with changing legislation are creating new challenges. With several retail giants lumbering online and the looming introduction of the government’s new carbon tax, CIOs need to be working with procurement, financial and other business leaders to ensure supply-chain systems are up to today’s new challenges.

If supply chain experts can spend so much time and effort improving efficiency and still have more work to do, how are smaller companies meant to get their supply chains right? It’s not as if they have been standing still: CIOs at FMCG organisations and other companies of all sizes have long focused on using high-end supply chain management solutions to trim fat from their company supply chains. Many embarked upon massive enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations a decade ago as they stared down the end-of-life of existing systems and the spectre of the Y2K bug. Yet while their intentions were good, the same can’t be said for the methods of resolution.