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Process Trip 04 February, 2008 13:07:03
Why Maritz Travel revamped key business processes — and how business and IT came together to make it workWhen Rich Phillips became COO OF Maritz Travel about two and-a-half years ago, he sat down and took a hard look at the big industry picture - +
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? - +
How to Get Real About Strategic Planning 04 February, 2008 12:50:59
Everyone agrees that having a strategic plan for IT is a good thing but most CIOs approach the process with fear and loathing. In fact, the majority of CIOs (and the enterprises they work for) are faking it when it comes to strategic planning. Isn't it time we all got real?Oh, it must be nice to be the CIO of a FedEx or a GE or a Credit Suisse. Places where IT and the business are so tightly aligned you can barely tell the two apart. Where corporate leaders understand that IT is a strategic asset and support it as such - +
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. - +
Your RFID Battle Plan 05 November, 2007 13:40:11
Electronic tags still don’t top CIO strategy lists. But as a tactical weapon, RFID can be used to fight old problems in new waysTracking chemicals through the manufacturing and distribution process is a critical requirement for Dow Chemical, to ensure safety and operational efficiency. In 2004, identification technologies such as RFID tags had gained significant buzz due to initiatives by the US Defence Department and Wal-Mart to mandate their use in supply chain and inventory management applications
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Five BI potholes to bypass 27 September, 2007 13:51:09
These experienced users already steered their way clear. Now they map out how you can, too.Business intelligence might be a maturing technology, but it's far from hassle-free. Tedious technology issues, including the need for comprehensive data cleansing and integrating incompatible computer systems, are still a big part of nearly all BI projects. - +
Tech giants chart research goals 27 September, 2007 10:18:02
EmTech Conference: IT giants discuss R&D projects for efficiency, parallelism, and mobile communicationsPower consumption, parallelism, and the rapidly-expanding world of mobile communications are among the leading areas of research and development investigated by some of the IT world's largest companies. - +
New Nortel Enterprise boss talks about game plan 24 September, 2007 10:17:44
Joel Hackney replaces Steve Slattery as Nortel Enterprise Solutions PresidentAfter 20 years with Nortel, Enterprise Solutions President Steve Slattery is leaving the company Oct. 1. Taking over immediately, however, is Joel Hackney, Nortel's former senior vice president of Global Operations and Quality, and another of CEO Mike Zafirovski's colleagues from General Electric. Hackney, credited with driving many of Nortel's recent operational, supply chain, customer and business improvements, shared some thoughts with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy on the sudden switch, which comes while Enterprise Solutions is enjoying some solid momentum -- although apparently, things aren't moving fast enoug - +
Microsoft's CIO reflects at the two-year mark 27 September, 2007 13:55:34
Microsoft's CIO talks about playing a revolutionary role, being his company's best customer and purging alien technologyWhy would a successful CIO leave one company to become co-CIO of another with only one-third the revenue and employees? Answer: The new company is Microsoft. Stuart Scott moved there in mid-2005 from General Electric, the US$160 billion, 319,000-employee behemoth where he had worked for 17 years, most recently as CIO of GE Industrial Systems. Then, about a year ago, co-CIO Ron Markezich was tapped to run Microsoft's budding managed services business. Scott has been Microsoft's sole CIO since then. - +
Using SOA to integrate the contact center 17 September, 2007 14:26:25
Companies are finding SOA enables them to closely align their customer contact infrastructure with the data, workflows and processes used to manage customer interactions across the organizationAmong the many benefits being delivered by service-oriented architectures, companies are finding SOA enables them to closely align their customer contact infrastructure with the data, workflows and processes used to manage customer interactions across the organization.
Read up on the latest ideas and technologies from companies that sell hardware, software and services. Dude! You Say I Need an Application-Layer Firewall?!
Optimized Back-up and Recovery for VMWare for VMWare Infrastructure with EMC Avamar
A Guide to Next-Generation Backup, Recovery and Archive
Understanding Email Marketing: A Guide for SMBs
Why Security SaaS Makes Sense Today
Using EMC Celerra IP Storage with Vmware Infrastructure 3 over iSCSI and NFS
Wireless LANs: Is my enterprise at risk?
Radicati Market Quadrant 2008 on Corporate Web Security
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SIDEBAR: Your RFID Battle Plan
Electronic tags still don't top CIO strategy lists. But as a tactical weapon, RFID can be used to fight old problems in new ways
By Galen Gruman
Tracking chemicals through the manufacturing and distribution process is a critical requirement for Dow Chemical, to ensure safety and operational efficiency. In 2004, identification technologies such as RFID tags had gained significant buzz due to initiatives by the US Defence Department and Wal-Mart to mandate their use in supply chain and inventory management applications. So CIO Dave Kepler periodically asked his IT staff whether Dow could take advantage of these technologies. The repeated answer: RFID was not mature enough.
But Kepler wasn't sure the scepticism was warranted. So in late 2005, he asked his staff to think about RFID differently. His request: Define the problems first, then see which technologies might be useful to address them - viewing RFID technology as a possible tactic in the larger product tracking strategy. "He didn't want technology for technology's sake, but he did want tight alignment to the corporate strategy," recalls Dave Asiala, a shared services IT director at Dow, who served as a member of the strategy development committee and assumed leadership of the implementation efforts.
Today, Dow has several pilot projects in place to test RFID and other location-oriented technologies such as GPS, two-way radios and traditional bar codes. Early projects have shown that sometimes - such as when it's paired with a sensor log to transmit environmental readings during shipments - the use of RFID makes sense. But at other times bar codes still prove cheaper and easier.
Dow's not alone: Despite years of discussion and "here's what you could do" stories from vendors, RFID remains in the pilot stage at many firms, especially outside the established retail warehouse and distribution use on pallets and shipping containers. Both the RFID technology and marketplace are fragmented and slow-moving, analysts say, and costs remain high. A Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) study earlier this year showed that while 84 percent of providers expect to offer RFID technology in the next three years, 66 percent say their customers have yet to implement RFID. That doesn't mean you should ignore RFID.
Dow's "keep your eyes open" approach is the right one, says Colin Masson, a research director at AMR Research. By itself, he says, RFID is still not a strategic technology that CIOs should have high on their agendas. But it can be useful in service of those strategies.
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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The Secrets of C-Suite Success
With help from the CIO Executive Council, we tap into research about successful executives. Read on to learn more about the competencies CIOs need to develop to take the corner office, where CIOs fall short and what CEOs expect from CIOs.
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