Stories by: Brad Howarth

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.