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Ticked Off at Tick the Box Mentality 04 February, 2008 13:01:15
Does your executive search firm know the difference between an MIS manager and a CIO, and if it does, can it explain that difference to its corporate clients?Does your executive search firm know its MIS managers from its elbow? Does it even know the difference between an MIS manager and a CIO, and if it does, can it explain that difference to its corporate clients? - +
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
Read up on the latest ideas and technologies from companies that sell hardware, software and services. The Secrets of C-Suite Success
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The IP Storage payoff: Turning your investment into efficient, affordable results
Using EMC Celerra IP Storage with Vmware Infrastructure 3 over iSCSI and NFS
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As open-source development options proliferate, CIOs are finding ways to make it work for their organizations
Reader ROI
- Why CIOs are growing more interested in open source
- How some CIOs are banding together in software development cooperatives
- Why some vendors are releasing product code to the open-source world
The next time you have a project in need of a software solution, try an experiment. Go to open-source collaboration site SourceForge (www.sourceforge.net), and spend five minutes running a search. The odds are good that you'll find an open-source project related to your problem. Free. No sales calls. No negotiations with vendors.
Granted, no service contracts or tech-support numbers either, most likely. But given the low barrier to entry, it's easy to understand why thousands of companies are tempted to use open source for, at the least, those projects that fall shy of the mission-critical line. And for those CIOs nervous about the support and licensing issues that surround open source, well-known vendors are increasingly releasing some of their own code to the open-source community. IBM, for example, in January released 500 of its software patents to open-source software developers. Sun has announced that it will release its Solaris operating system under an open-source licence.
Of course, if you're looking at open source precisely because you want to get away from those very vendors, maybe there's a better alternative: a cooperative of like-minded, open-source-loving CIOs just waiting for you to join. The options for using open source have never been greater, and you owe it to yourself - and your company - to take a close look.
Power of Cooperation
One of the challenges of using open source is simply finding a product that meets your needs and your quality standards. While many developers need an e-mail client or Web browser (hence, the rabid developer base for open-source projects such as Mozilla's Thunderbird and FireFox), finding a spontaneously developed tool to integrate your three retail-specific supply chain applications isn't as likely. And even if your SourceForge search uncovered such a tool, there's no guarantee that the developers wrote it with the care your enterprise requires. (To at least partially address this concern, VA Software offers SourceForge Enterprise Edition (SFEE), which helps developers create shared code environments among known collaborators, and the Tapestry portal, which lets Enterprise Edition users access information about other SFEE projects.) Plus there's the "where did this code really come from" legal question. To assuage these fears, some organizations have turned to cooperation with peers for their open-source development.
One of the most high-profile examples is the Avalanche Corporate Technology Cooperative, a collective development effort founded by a group of Minnesota-based companies, including Best Buy, Cargill and Jostens. Just over a year ago, the group formed to identify opportunities for open-source development projects that could benefit all the members. The goal of this cooperative is to pool resources so that interested companies can jump into new projects while spreading out the risks and expenses. Some of the members, for instance, are too small to create full-blown development efforts on projects such as building an open-source desktop reference environment, but by combining efforts, they can all reap the rewards. Avalanche currently has a half-dozen projects under way, including one to create a reference design for an open-source desktop and another to build a business activity monitoring engine.
"We're relative novices in the whole open-source area," says Mike Thyken, senior vice president and CIO at bedding manufacturer and Avalanche member Select Comfort. "We started looking at everything it was going to take to get a Linux/open-source world put together, and we saw that it was very redundant between companies."
So Select Comfort joined Avalanche, contributing a membership fee of $US30,000 as well as some time from technical architecture experts inside the company to Avalanche's Linux reference environment project. As a result, Select Comfort expected to receive deliverables on a Linux desktop and server architecture early in 2005, all for a "fairly modest" investment of money and time, Thyken says - far less than if the company had attempted the project on its own.
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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Information security governance: Centralized vs. distributed 05 September, 2008 10:15:00
Should security policies, procedures and processes be managed within a central body, or distributed at an individual level? You need to find the middle ground.The management of information risk has become a significant topic for all organizations, small and large alike. But for the large, multi-divisional organization, it poses the additional challenge of determining how to deploy an information security governance program among what are often disparate business units. Should the policies, procedures, and processes that define the program be developed and managed within a central, corporate body? Or perhaps responsibility would be better placed at the individual unit level? Is there a workable middle-ground? - +
DNS error brings Sophos antivirus updates to a halt 05 September, 2008 13:40:00
Optus, Internode and Equinix affected among others.A sporadic Domain Name Server (DNS) error has blocked Sophos anti-virus updates around the world. - +
Ouch! Security pros' worst mistakes 04 September, 2008 08:05:00
We've all done regrettable things on the job, but does any valuable wisdom come of it? Four security pros candidly explain their biggest blunders and what they learned in the processIt was a mistake so bad the person who made it asked that his name and company not be mentioned here. Let's call him Frank. - +
Security ROI: Fact or Fiction? 03 September, 2008 08:32:00
Bruce Schneier says ROI is a big deal in business, but it's a misnomer in security. Make sure your financial calculations are based on good data and sound methodologies.Return on investment, or ROI, is a big deal in business. Any business venture needs to demonstrate a positive return on investment, and a good one at that, in order to be viable. - +
Information Security and the Importance of Context 01 September, 2008 10:00:00
Those entrusted with information security must raise their contextual awarenessWhen the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was first created, it created a sudden need for tens of thousands of screeners. Getting a job as an airport screener was a pretty easy process. It seemed as though if you had a pulse, you were in. Jump forward to 2008 and becoming a screener is a bit harder as the TSA has instituted background checks, has upped the educational requirement to include a high school diploma or GED, and added other significant requirements.
Viva la Verticals! Key to Vendor Growth is Through Vertical Market Opportunities, Says IDC 05 September, 2008 11:05:00
F-Secure delivers fastest protection in the online world 04 September, 2008 16:50:00
Rogue security apps dominate Fortinet's Aug 2008 IT threat report 04 September, 2008 16:00:00
IntraPower Signs Deal with Australia’s Largest Service Station and Convenience Store Network 04 September, 2008 10:07:00
TANDBERG Begins Desktop Videoconferencing Roll-Out at New England Credit Union 03 September, 2008 16:01:00
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