How enthusiasm for enterprise social tools is spread by people and why their sponsorship might bypass the IT department entirely.

Machine-to-machine communication is set to dominate Internet use but will create a huge number of data issues.

When Vito Forte started in his role as CIO at Fortescue Metals Group 18 months ago he was heading up a function that supported around 1500 users. Today that number has blossomed to more than 6000, but Forte’s IT function has not increased its headcount by anything close to that ratio.

For Australian taxpayers, the concept is not new, but it is also certainly something that only a few would be comfortable facing, regardless of how compliant they are.

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.