Opinions
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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 - +
Toxic Mix or Bit of a Mixed Blessing? 31 December, 2007 10:36:30
“Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog . . . ” The inter-generational office brew of Boomer, Gen X and Gen Y may not be quite as odious as that of the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but even so it makes “for a charm of powerful trouble”"Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog . . . " The inter-generational office brew of Boomer, Gen X and Gen Y may not be quite as odious as that of the three witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth, but even so it makes "for a charm of powerful trouble" - +
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.
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Adobe launches hosted services, adds Flash to Acrobat 03 June, 2008 09:02:44
Adobe to launch Web site offering users free hosted services for document creation, sharing and storageAdobe this week is set to unveil the next version of its Adobe Acrobat software, which adds support for the company's Flash multimedia technology. The company also plans to launch a new Web site offering users free hosted services for document creation, sharing and storage. - +
Bill Gates: A New Approach to Capitalism in the 21st Century 28 January, 2008 07:12:19
Transcript of Gates speech, and a Q&A at World Economic Forum in Davos, SwitzerlandAs you all may know, in July I'll make a big career change. I'm not worried; I believe I'm still marketable. I'm a self-starter, I'm proficient in Microsoft Office. I guess that's it. Also I'm learning how to give money away. - +
Can Macs conquer the enterprise? 11 January, 2008 10:55:53
The field is wide open for a Macintosh insurrection on the business desktop. It could happen, but probably won't. Here's why.If Apple were a football team, the New England Patriots would have had some serious competition this year. - +
Letter: Contract duty 28 September, 2005 15:03:16
A great IT pro? Don't they call them IBM consultants or outsourcers?
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I recently attended a seminar on service-oriented architecture (SOA) mainly to discover why, given it's already been around for a few years (an eternity in IT management time), people are still holding seminars on it.
My younger colleague remarked that oriented was an unusual word and suggested it was probably coined by a consultant. It turns out he was spot on. SOA was lobbed onto the acronym court in a 1996 research paper by a Gartner boffin, although the term didn't become widely used until around 2002.
SOA associates new terminology with concepts that have been around for some time such as CORBA, DCOM and DCE. SOA's new concept is the concept that it is new, while in reality it's just re-using ideas that were the Next Big Thing a decade ago. But the IT industry has never let history get in its way, so with a shiny new acronym SOA is now this decade's Next Big Thing.
Earlier this year, a joint research project by Computerworld and Hydrasight on local adoption rates of SOA revealed 44 percent of companies surveyed had already started or piloted SOA projects. A different measure of its success is the survey by Network Computing that found SOA was the most despised buzzword last year.
Not only is SOA a buzzword itself, descriptions of SOA are jam-packed with buzzwords. Orchestrate, granularity, composability, componentization, centre of excellence, proven international governance standards, control objectives and (my personal favourite) SOA reference architecture. Wow, two architectures in the one buzz phrase. The best buzz comes from OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), which defines SOA as "a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains". Which, aside from the admirable use of the former buzz champion paradigm, doesn't actually say anything.
Although everyone tells me that SOA is a definition and not just a set of products, I might find it a wee more credible if the people telling me were not all software vendors pushing their set of SOA products.
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19th August, 2008 Four Seasons Hotel, Sydney Developed in partnership with CIO Magazine, IDC, INTEP and the CIO Executive Council.
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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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Citibank debit card fraud highlights ATM vulnerabilities 08 July, 2008 08:17:53
'Back-end servers are kind of a joke,' and the trouble doesn't end thereMalicious ATM intrusions, such as the late-winter breach that resulted in the compromise of Citibank debit card data, are not at all surprising given the vulnerable state of many of the servers and other components involved in processing such transactions, according to some industry representatives. - +
How to not have your Web site hacked like Sony's 07 July, 2008 08:23:22
A SQL injection attack was used to plant malicious code on pages of two popular Sony Playstation games - SingStar Pop and God of War, reports security company Sophos. Hundreds of Web pages from other businesses have also been compromised.The US Sony Playstation Web site is the latest high-profile victim of a hacker attack on business sites that's spreading malware at breakneck pace, says a security vendor. - +
AG launches review into national e-security 07 July, 2008 11:07:49
Howard's security agenda dragged over coals.A review of Australia's top e-security projects lead by the Attorney-General's Department has been launched to scrutinise the Howard's government's $73 million E-Security National Agenda. - +
Selling zero-day exploits has a down side 07 July, 2008 10:16:36
There is an ongoing argument about the ethics of selling 0-day exploits on the open market: It helps if you don't sell exploits targeting the company you work for.Information Security can sometimes be a funny field to work in. Some days it seems as if anybody with their hands on unpublished exploit code can sell it for all they're worth, and others it seems that they are set to become the target of law enforcement and the companies the code affects. It does help if you don't work for one of the companies that is set to be affected by the exploits you are trying to sell and aren't trying to bootstrap a competing company in the process. - +
'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.
Zepto release the Mythos, the 2nd installment in the Centrino 2 refresh 09 July, 2008 12:05:00
Symantec Data Protection Solutions Preferred by Users and Industry Experts 09 July, 2008 11:56:00
Frost & Sullivan: Australia’s Mobile Advertising Spend to Grow 300 Per Cent in 2008 09 July, 2008 07:57:00
DIARY ALERT - Symantec data leakage prevention seminars 08 July, 2008 17:20:00
Dimension Data Appoints New National Human Resources Director 08 July, 2008 16:58:00
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Application Modernization: Preserving Your Organization’s DNA
Modernization has once again attained buzz-word status. But like any other term with billions of dollars swimming around it, modernization has taken on some unexpected connotations. Read on to discover how to embrace modernization in your organization successfully.
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