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  • 5 Ways to make costs cuts stick

    Short-term cuts are easy; but making them stick is more difficult. Sales, general and administrative (often grouped as ‘SGA’) prove to be particularly intransigent. While manufacturing efficiencies have improved in recent years, SGA has remained more or less at same levels.

    Written by Morris Kaplan • 21 March 11 16:54

  • The era of empowerment

    As we describe in Forrester’s new book Empowered, your customers are empowered by better information than ever before. They can check a price, read a product review, or ask for advice from a friend right from the screen of their smartphone.

    Written by Tim Sheedy • 23 Dec. 10 09:00

  • Public sector still challenged by ICT 'silver bullets'

    Recent experience is showing us that investing in an ICT initiative is one of the highest risk activities the public sector could be involved with. It is surely the case when headlines like ‘millions wasted’, ‘years late’, and ‘minister resigns’ becomes the public’s corporate memory of a complex ICT project. So why does the public sector keep looking for ‘silver bullet’ ICT solutions when the available evidence shows continued under-performance, under-scoping and under-estimation of complexity and risk?

    Written by Paul O'Connor • 15 Dec. 10 09:00
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    Wikileaks: info-porn for the masses

    The latest Wikileaks release — so-called ‘Cablegate’ — is a demonstration of how the road to Hell is not just paved, but lavishly signposted, Google-mapped, and well-lit at night with good intentions.

    Written by Martin Dart • 01 Dec. 10 13:21
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    Cloud computing - the next industrial revolution

    The term ‘Cloud computing’ continues to receive a lot of attention from the media and within the IT industry there is perpetual debate on definitions and from vendors a relentless succession of press releases on their latest cloud offerings.

    Written by Scott Stewart • 25 Oct. 10 12:34
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    Like the NBN or not, let's make the most of it

    As the 2010 federal election finally came to a close this week technology and political commentators alike have centred their post-poll opinions around the most pivotal policy – the National Broadband Network. With Labor back in the driver's seat the NBN is set to go ahead. It's now time to forget the politics and get behind this advanced technology infrastructure project to make it a success.

    Written by Rodney Gedda • 08 Sept. 10 11:18

  • Head in the cloud

    In the Harvard Business Review’s May 2003 edition, author Nicholas Carr created a long-running storm of controversy with the article ‘IT doesn’t matter’. It spawned a countless succession of articles in both industry and academic circles. About a year later he followed the article with a published book, Does IT Matter? in which he expanded and clarified further on his controversial themes.

    Written by Scott Stewart • 08 Sept. 10 12:18

  • Wealth management: Deceptively simple

    The ANZ recently announced its intention to ramp up its drive into the wealth management sector and HSBC Australia plans to expand into the ‘mass affluent’ market. Both announcements reflect the need felt by all the Australian banks to find new ways of increasing shareholder value in a crowd

    Written by Peter Dugdale • 10 Aug. 10 16:38

  • Modernising government IT

    The recent budget handed down by the federal government offered fairly slim pickings for the IT industry. The e-Health reforms are still on the table, while other projects such as new passport issuing systems, defence data centre upgrades and efforts to combat money laundering and organised crime were also announced. But, generally speaking, in an effort to bring the budget deficit back into the black, the government has taken a pretty conservative approach to IT spend. Which poses the question: Has there been any consideration taken towards modernising legacy IT systems? Could this be one sensible way to cut costs and, at the same time, bring some of these ancient systems — and let’s face it, many government bodies are running on some pretty archaic infrastructure — into the 21st century?

    Written by Bruce Craig • 21 July 10 07:00

  • Pre-Packaged Private Cloud: 4 Questions to Ask

    IT professionals have the basic ingredients to cook up their own cloud-like infrastructure-but there's no recipe, and many ingredients don't combine well. Especially as infrastructure innovation evolves in a way that doesn't necessarily deliver better efficiency and instead, drives up complexity. Yet, the most common answer infrastructure and operations professionals recently told Forrester that what motivates server virtualization adoption was the need for greater efficiency and sharing of the IT infrastructure. Over the years, vendors have tried to accommodate this need, but have often provided solutions that left too much of the burden on their customers-until now. Recent integrated solutions take a big step toward delivering complete virtual infrastructures that just might solve some of the major issues IT professional face.

    Written by James Staten • 17 June 10 04:39

  • Cloud Computing: The Dangers of Irrational Economics

    This weekend saw the publication by Joe Weinman, coiner of the term "Cloudonomics," of a blog post called "Lazy, Hazy, Crazy: The 10 Laws of Behavioral Cloudonomics". Joe has published a great deal analyzing the economics of cloud computing, much of which illustrates that cloud computing can provide significant financial benefits. But this latest post is a must-read, because its implications are crucial to every IT organization.

    Written by Bernard Golden • 10 June 10 05:43

  • Practical strategies for an effective government CIO construct

    Public sector CIOs are being challenged by one of the sector’s greatest operational reforms. Here are some practical strategies for an effective approach to government CIO.

    Written by Bruce Carlos • 03 June 10 10:34

  • A government CIO 2.0 construct

    Public sector CIOs are being challenged by one of the sector’s greatest operational reforms. The Victorian Government will face significantly greater and continuing challenges unless there is some consistency in CIO roles in departments and agencies (D&As) and a robust governance framework to manage CenITex, the Government Services Division (GSD) and D&As’ expectations.

    Written by Bruce Carlos • 03 June 10 10:21

  • Tablet PCs start to get Handii

    Earlier this year I wrote a TechWorld blog about Apple’s new iPad and how it may ignite the tablet PC industry. Judging by the number of competing offerings that have popped up since, at the very least we’re in for a lot more tablet choice.

    Written by Rodney Gedda • 23 April 10 10:52

  • Risk Priorities for Financial Institutions in 2010

    Looking through the holidays into 2010 there are four clear priorities for risk management that cut across all tiers with financial institutions. Over the last year the pendulum has swung from the exotic to the pragmatic, from chaos to order within financial services. The four priorities for risk in 2010 can be derived from the word D.A.T.A.(data, analysis, transparency, accuracy).

    Written by Dana Wiklund • 09 Dec. 09 08:08

  • Are international standards organisations no longer incorruptible?

    For the last several months Microsoft has been pushing for their Office Open XML (OOXML) office suite file specification to be accepted as an international standard by ISO, presumably to help them gain traction for future government contracts (look, this file specification is an ISO standard, it must be good).

    Written by Carl Jongsma • 08 Oct. 08 13:55
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    Sarah Palin demonstrates the peril of webmail

    If you needed any more reminders about why it isn't a good idea to use external mail services to conduct critical business, the recent break-in to US Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's gov.palin@yahoo.com Yahoo inbox should be it. Of note is that following the disclosure of the inboxes the compromised address and another address, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, have been suspended.

    Written by Carl Jongsma • 18 Sept. 08 12:35

  • Georgia Cyber Attacks By Russian Gov't? Not So Fast

    In recent days, news and government websites in Georgia have suffered DDoS attacks. While these attacks seem to indirectly affect the backbone of the Georgian Internet, it is still there.

    Written by Gadi Evron • 14 Aug. 08 13:48

  • When weak web security can expose medical records

    With recent reporting showing the ineffectiveness of breach disclosure laws on the rate and scope of data losses, what sort of teeth will HIPAA and similar laws have when electronic health records are compromised in similar numbers and scope.

    Written by Carl Jongsma • 16 June 08 10:46
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    A Formula for Alignment

    Why would someone complete medical school and residency training, then spend a decade in IT to become a CIO?

    Written by Tom Abendroth • 06 March 07 12:21
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