Opinions
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Strategies for Dealing With IT Complexity 24 December, 2007 10:30:47
Every innovation, every business process improvement, comes with an IT complexity tax that must be paid by CIOs in time, money and sweat. Here are strategies to mitigate the increasing complexity of IT as it enables new business.Every innovation, every business process improvement, comes with an IT complexity tax that must be paid by CIOs in time, money and sweat. Here are strategies to mitigate the increasing complexity of IT as it enables new business. - +
Doing Your Sums on . . . Build, Buy or Rent 05 November, 2007 13:32:30
You’re trying to build a world-class IT team, but everyone’s going after the same talent pool. What mix works best? Should you grow your own, draft your players or barter your way to the line-up you want to field?CIOs should never forget that while new technologies have a maturity cycle, the maturity cycle for human beings in IT is even longer - +
Your World. . . Hacked 02 October, 2007 10:51:23
As your business becomes more collaborative and global, the risks to your company’s trade secrets rise proportionally. Fortunately, there are new strategies to protect the data that allows you to competeThe call to Bob Bailey, an IT executive with a major US government contractor, came on an otherwise ordinary day in October 2003. "Why are you attacking us?" demanded the caller, an IT leader with a Silicon Valley manufacturer. He wanted to know why Bailey's company had launched a denial-of-service attack against his network - +
Offshoring Grows Up 02 April, 2007 15:30:57
Debates continue to rage on the merits and morality of getting technology work done for wages lower than those of local counterparts. But meanwhile, the practice of offshoring has not only become more prevalent, it has also begun to mature.In effect, offshoring has grown up. In its infancy, just a handful of adventurous companies sent highly codified work overseas. During its rebellious adolescence, it stirred a furious national debate, and the practice's previously unrecognized management challenges and hidden costs came to light. - +
It Is the Business, Stupid 10 December, 2006 13:59:51
When projects go pear-shaped it's usually because there's too much focus on technology, and not enough on business outcomes and associated changeIn a 2005 article"Why Software Projects Fail", Cutter Consortium Fellow Robert Charette narrates an infamous anecdote about a disappearing warehouse.
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Offshoring grows up 13 March, 2007 14:38:26
The next generation of outsourcing sees multishore arrangements being made with more nuanced and strategic goalsThe word offshoring still causes some IT professionals to break out in a cold sweat and others to reach a low boil. Debates continue to rage on the merits and morality of getting technology work done by non-Americans for wages lower than those of their U.S. counterparts. But meanwhile, the practice of offshoring has not only become more prevalent, it has also begun to mature.
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There is growing interest in outsourcing software development to China, but some CIOs worry about their intellectual property. Is that perception accurate?
An increasing number of software companies as well as CIOs from a variety of industries are looking to China to outsource some of their software development. Good experiences in India have made the prospect of going far offshore more palatable. And as prices in India and other markets rise, cost-conscious CIOs are looking for even less-expensive alternatives.
If done properly, outsourcing to China can be a great opportunity. Chinese development is considerably less expensive than in most other places now being used. And China's capabilities are growing rapidly, thanks to increasing economic development and improving technology education.
But there is one big red flag that gets raised when executives talk about sending work to China - weak intellectual property (IP) protection. A recent survey by China's Ministry of Information Industry found that 61 percent of foreign companies operating in China see software piracy as the number-one problem of doing business there. Indeed, the IP issue may be why the Chinese outsourcing industry is facing fragmentation and low market share. In 2004, China captured only $US700 million of the global IT outsourcing market, valued at $US198 billion, and there are virtually no outsourcing players there with more than a few thousand employees. Multinational companies fear that disreputable service providers could resell their software under a different name or even sell the code to competitors.
However, while there has been a high rate of theft of personal productivity and entertainment software at the consumer level (software that usually ships in a few CDs and does not require customization or expert knowledge for installation), there are few, if any, documented cases of IP being stolen or compromised when a Chinese development company was involved. The low theft rate of Chinese-developed software is due in part to the fact that most of the software work now done in China is for the Japanese market, which splits the source-code development across many vendors so that no one vendor has access to the complete code.
In reality, software developed for corporations is difficult to copy because it invariably is tailored to specific business requirements and so is not easily replicable, and it's likely to require expertise to install. The China head of a leading ERP software company confirmed that the company does not face issues with piracy in China because its software "does not come shrink-wrapped in a CD, and you cannot just press 'install' to install it". Its software requires complex configuration, and companies can't derive business benefits until such configuration happens.
The perception that China is an unsafe place to develop code may be based on the fact that China's enforcement of IP rights lags behind its enactment of IP laws. Historically, there has been little consequence to the domestic use of pirated software, especially if developed by foreign companies and used for personal use. In the recent McKinsey China Software Industry Survey, which surveyed the top 100 software companies in China, 60 percent of the executives interviewed were sympathetic toward local customers' propensity to use pirated software developed by foreign companies. China tends to deal more harshly with stolen software sold to foreign entities than with software sold domestically. The laws themselves are not clear-cut. An attorney from a leading IP law firm in China said that "laws to protect software copyright resemble those in Europe . . . There is a grey area as to what constitutes 'significant' resemblance - hence, copyright infringement - of two products".
The risks can be mitigated if companies follow some basic guidelines to manage the development environment, educate and manage the staff, and pursue breaches and illegal users. Companies that are outsourcing (or offshoring) successfully in China set and enforce standards in these three areas:
2008 CIO Summit
19th August, 2008 Four Seasons Hotel, Sydney Developed in partnership with CIO Magazine, IDC, INTEP and the CIO Executive Council.
The world of the CIO is extremely complex and diverse. Multiple priorities demand attention and decisions are needed instantly. Individual teams need to be driven towards common goals, and businesses strive to become more mobile, agile and responsive. For CIOs, the challenge never ends.
Every year the CIO Summit identifies what is top of mind for CIOs across Australia and New Zealand, and offers insight for CIO benchmarking and vendor strategic planning alike.
Recent IDC research shows that over 59% of CIO's believe that 'to achieve their business strategies, technology should be used more aggressively than today.'
Join us on August 19th to discover how this is possible with the latest technologies including Virtualisation, Web 2.0, IP Surveillance and Software as a Service (Saas).
Click here for more information.
Please email Denyse_Robertson@idg.com.au for further information.
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CIO Live Podcast #79: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires Part II 05 October, 2007 06:00:00
For his new book, The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires, social researcher Brent D Taylor spent four years of intensive research investigating the psychological make-up and backgrounds of some of the world's richest men and women, including IT luminaries Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. Taylor discovered that, despite working in different industries and coming from different upbringings, they all have one thing in common -- they are all outsiders. - +
CIO Live Podcast #78: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires 28 September, 2007 17:34:25
For his new book, The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires, social researcher Brent D Taylor spent four years of intensive research investigating the psychological make-up and backgrounds of some of the world's richest men and women, including IT luminaries Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. Taylor discovered that, despite working in different industries and coming from different upbringings, they all have one thing in common -- they are all outsiders. - +
CIO Live Podcast #77: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part III 21 September, 2007 07:00:00
Part three in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance. - +
CIO Live Podcast #76: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part II 14 September, 2007 07:00:00
Part two in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance. - +
CIO Live Podcast #75: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part I 07 September, 2007 07:00:05
Part one in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance.
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'I have a lost laptop horror story for you' 30 June, 2008 10:08:14
The devil of identity theft is in the details that follow...The devil of identity theft is in the details that follow: Russ Jones tells a tale of woe that isn't particularly dramatic -- or rare -- and yet it's exactly the kind of story that worries me enough to ignore my better judgment and buy identity-theft protection from my insurance provider. - +
SQL attacks lobs onto pro tennis site 02 July, 2008 11:52:19
Wimbledon perfect time for crook's criminal racket.Visitors to the Association of Tennis Professionals Web site have potentially been infected with spyware after apparent lax security allowed a malicious script to be injected across its pages. - +
Hacking tools: A new version of BackTrack helps ethical hackers 30 June, 2008 10:57:21
BackTrack is the quickest way to get access to hundreds of (legal) hacking toolsVersion 3.0 of BackTrack has been released. BackTrack is a Linux-based distribution dedicated to penetration testing or hacking (depending on how you look at it). It contains more than 300 of the world's most popular open source or freely distributable hacking tools. - +
Japanese military loses data again 02 July, 2008 08:17:21
Japan's Self Defense Force lost sensitive data on joint US-Japan military exerciseJapan's Self Defense Force lost sensitive data pertaining to a joint US-Japan military exercise last year, the Ministry of Defense said Tuesday. - +
ACLU, EFF sue US gov't over mobile phone tracking 03 July, 2008 08:37:23
Two civil liberties groups sue the US Department of Justice over mobile phone trackingThe American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are asking a federal court to order the US Department of Justice to turn over records about the agency's tracking of mobile phone users.
Ballarat Grammar Improves Student Access to Computer Based Learning with HP ProCurve 04 July, 2008 16:49:00
Media release: 40 Per Cent of Australian Businesses Do Not Validate Their Data 04 July, 2008 10:29:00
Kaseya helps turbo charge BlueFire’s service delivery model 03 July, 2008 17:23:00
Computershare Selects Symantec for Data Loss Prevention Globally 03 July, 2008 14:52:00
DST International moves to new Shanghai office 03 July, 2008 13:21:00
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Growth Strategies in Uncertain Times: Building and Maintaining Lasting Client Relationships in Professional Services Organisations
To stand out and build your business, there are certain key attributes you must build across your firm. Learn how to grow your business and to think strategically about building and deepening core client relationships by reading on.
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