What a difference a year makes. Twelve months ago it was almost impossible to find Australian organisations that had embraced cloud computing. Now pretty much everyone is planning, piloting or executing some form of migration to the cloud. If there was ever doubt that cloud was little more than hype, it was eradicated in April 2010 by Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) group executive for enterprise services and chief information officer, Michael Harte. In a speech to Committee for Economic Development in Australia, Harte declared that never again did he wish to be locked into using proprietary hardware or software and cloud computing was his escape route.

After appointing its first CIO in January, the Australian National Maritime Museum has successfully migrated its e-mail and groupware system to the cloud as it prepares for a complete IT overhaul.

The first wave of enterprise search helped companies tap into the world of text+, sometimes referred to as "unstructured" or "semi-structured" information. Primary drivers included the need to monetize digital content, reduce risk through compliance, or increase employee, customer and partner productivity. These early implementations provided significant value and solved important problems; they also demonstrated limitations that have lead to demand for the next generation -- Unified Information Access (UIA).

The promise of cost savings derived from cloud computing is attractive, but concrete financial returns are not always quickly achieved. Except, perhaps, when it comes to disaster recovery.

What a difference a year makes. Twelve months ago it was almost impossible to find Australian organisations that had embraced cloud computing. Now pretty much everyone is planning, piloting or executing some form of migration to the cloud. If there was ever doubt that cloud was little more than hype, it was eradicated in April 2010 by Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) group executive for enterprise services and chief information officer, Michael Harte. In a speech to Committee for Economic Development in Australia, Harte declared that never again did he wish to be locked into using proprietary hardware or software and cloud computing was his escape route.

It’s the bête noire of C-level managers the world over — too often, it’s easy to be pulled into the morass of day-to-day issues at the expense of strategy. If the role is predominantly operational, fair enough, but being forced into operations when you were hired to be strategic (or vice versa) is frustrating for everybody involved. So how do CIOs balance operations and strategy? Aligning the departmental business plan with the organisation’s strategic plan is an obvious starting point. Beyond that, however, CIOs have developed their own methods of staying strategic.

Sydney-based Verb IT is the first company in the Asia Pacific region to provision an HP Performance Optimised Datacentre (POD) next-generation data centre in a shipping container. The new Verb DC site where the POD is located is a standard industrial warehouse in Wyong on the NSW Central Coast (one hour north of Sydney). Verb DC is schedueld to go live in September after a 14-week project, including the POD delivery time. In what is being painted as a big win for the Central Coast IT industry, the new POD will provide computing services to local businesses and the world.

How empowered are your employees to solve customer and business problems? What's your role in empowering them? These questions are often absent from IT's mission, but not from the minds of those it serves.