No longer capable of remaining on the sidelines as a separate administrative domain, today's networked storage must be managed with a deeper awareness of business objectives.

Many enterprise customers are dragging their feet on adopting and implementing storage resource management (SRM) offerings, leaving their IT environments in danger of data overruns, capacity planning woes and poor storage strategy execution, according to a study by Forrester Research.

Chris Boebel, the director of information technology at Delta Sonic Car Wash Systems, had a big sales job on his hands

The PGA Tour would have needed a significant personnel and capacity boost for its data centre, including servers, storage, power and heating and cooling, to handle the eventual spikes in usage during each tournament at a cost that would have negated any potential revenue. On-demand computing provided the answer.

Call it the Data Centre Land Grab of 2007. Big-name companies like Microsoft, Google and HSBC have already ponied up hundreds of millions of dollars this year to stake their claim to acres of land across the country, their first step toward building state-of-the-art, next-generation data centres.

The best ideas for your business might come from someone who doesn't even work for you. That's the contention made by author and consultant Don Tapscott in his newest book, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Tapscott, along with co-author Anthony Williams (who teaches at the London School of Economics), believes that the pervasiveness of the Internet will usher in an era where companies will lower their proprietary barriers and collaborate to foster greater innovation. As people employ instant messaging, blogs, wikis and other Web-based applications to communicate and develop ideas, Tapscott believes the Internet will become a platform on which companies will be forced to seek external talent in order to solve their greatest challenges.

Procter & Gamble is famous for being innovative, but the hard truth is that it had better be. The company spends 3.4 percent of its revenue on R&D, more than twice the average of 1.6 percent in the consumer packaged goods industry. But big spending on R&D does not guarantee success: A study by consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton found no correlation between dollars spent on R&D and profitability. What matters is the productivity of that spend - the "hit rate" of ideas that lead to products.

Business runs, by default, on e-mail. It's always there, and it just works, so we end up using it for everything - as a telephone, as a filing cabinet and as a conference room. But the trouble with e-mail is that it happily gobbles up our ideas, crucial documents and business acumen and doesn't give them back.

For all the profitability they currently enjoy, Australian companies have a "date with defeat" unless they stop inhibiting innovation and learn how to keep abreast of changes - at macro and micro levels - that are occurring at a faster pace than ever before, according to Jan Kolbusz, a serial entrepreneur who is probably best known to the ICT community for the time he spent as director of technology and operations at Sealcorp.

Like most CIOs, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Colin Knowles recognizes the importance of information lifecycle management. What distinguishes Knowles's role as director of technology and distribution at the national broadcaster is how the strategic importance of managing information over its lifecycle forms a fundamental pillar of the organization's business.

When Paul Tang first downloaded Google's desktop search application, he was impressed by its speed and power. Instead of painstakingly looking for data and files on his hard drive, he could find them with the ease of a Web search. However, Tang, chief medical information officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF), quickly realized that the slick application could also be dangerous.