Stories about: PricewaterhouseCoopers

In the past 12 months, Australian CIOs have honed their communication, leadership and management skills and deepened their business and industry knowledge and experience

Four out of five public sector outsourcing contracts have to be renegotiated, research by management consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers has found.

As long as they're meeting their regulatory reporting deadlines, most enterprises don't think a lot about closing their books more quickly.

Maybe they should start.

Increasingly, the speed with which an organization closes its books and reports its financial results is being looked at by practitioners, analysts and investors as a defining metric for evaluating whether the organization possesses the best possible processes and enabling technologies. And it turns out that many companies don't, even those making huge IT investments and supporting equally large IT departments.

Open source has many allures: no licence costs, a wide range of support venues and the ability to work directly with code for customization or quick repairs. But it can create IT headaches, too: The mantra of open source has been "release early and often", which means IT managers using a disparate group of open-source apps face frequent updates and patches, and must craft rules about how and when to apply them.

Computer vendors still squire CIOs to the opera, to island conferences or fact- finding missions overseas. And, yes, the wife can come too if you'll give up the business seat for two in economy. But what are the risks of such rewards?

It's a long climb to the top - and when you get there it can be lonely.

Since day one the issue of offshoring has been a scratchy one, raising both eyebrows and hackles. And now, with some organizations chafing three-to-four years into their offshore contracts, apparently there's a real itch to scratch.

A glance back in CIO's rearview mirror . . .

The typical computer network isn't like a house with windows, doors and locks. It's more like a gauze tent encircled by a band of drunk teenagers with lit matches".

It's a question of Shakespearean proportions. Should you license a commercial enterprise application that will meet 75 percent of your needs, or would it be nobler to build your own application, one that will track as closely as possible to the task at hand?

CRM and business intelligence from open source? You bet.