Stories about: Corrs Chambers Westgarth

How does your vendor rate as a supplier? Are you happy with your support and services? When it comes to rating vendors, customers are ideally placed to recount their own, first-hand experiences. Put simply customers are on the frontline. There are no analyst reports or vendor brochures that can match the real-world assessment of a customer. In a bid to set the ratings landscape, Siobhan McBride and Sandra Rossi polled readers asking them to nominate the top two vendors they'd dealt with recently and those who didn't come up to scratch.

A recent survey of CIOs on their experience with business integration projects presents a worrying scenario - costs as a percentage of IT budget are high, successful completion is going down, the easy ones have all been done and the remaining projects are more complex and prone to failure in reaching their expected ROI.

Open the bottom drawer, blow the dust from those IT contracts and go searching for the demons and the diamonds that lurk within

Legal challenges to sharing information

The arrival of Australia's innovation patent this month should make it easier for business to protect intellectual property associated with e-commerce processes and, in some cases, secure an eight-year monopoly over best practice.

After decades of hard slog, the value of information technology is finally pulling into focus for Australian boardrooms. However, CEO's and company directors still prefer to keep their IT staff at arm's length. Beverley Head reports on the scratchy relationship which persists between the CEO and the CIO.