
Authoritative.
Strategic.

It's been more than three years since HP acquired IT services provider EDS, and the long-term direction of its bigger - if not better - outsourcing business is no more clear than it was on the day the deal closed.
Five key points CIOs should know when considering big data
We all make mistakes. But when you work in IT, those errors can quickly go public.
Five years from now, the CIO will be a better, faster, stronger version of today's top IT leader, practically running the company single-handedly. Or maybe other business executives will become more educated about IT and decide to hire cloud companies to do it all, leaving the poor CIO to wither, enforcing service-level agreements for a living. For almost as long as there have been CIOs, we've heard breathless speculation about whether the position will last, and if so, in what form.
Data-driven project portfolio management Project management suffered an identity crisis half a decade ago, when ever-more-empowered developers were learning to work directly with their business patrons as Agile development philosophies encouraged developers to co-ordinate their activities in tight-knit teams that regularly report, evaluate, reassess and re-plan their short-term strategies.
It’s never easy to bring two organisations together, but when they’re both huge companies with millions of customers and deeply entrenched cultures, the difficulty level goes up dramatically. Throw in the pressures of Australia’s cutthroat telecommunications industries, and it’s no surprise that Chelsea Love looks back on the consolidation of Vodafone and Three Australia with some relief.
As of November 2011, 91.4 million people in the United States-owned smartphones, according to comScore. That was an 8 per cent increase over just a few months before. And if the trend continues, as most analysts and smartphone vendors believe it will, the number of individuals in the United States with a smartphone will be close to, if not exceed, 100 million by March 2012 - that's nearly one out of three Americans. And that's not including the number of people using iPads and tablet PCs, which was well over 15 million as of June 2011, per CTIA, the Wireless Association.
Are you a jargon junkie? Got an insatiable appetite for information? Do you rule over your company's systems with an iron fist, unwilling to yield control until someone pries the keyboard from your cold, dead hands?
In a fast growing sector, the bottom line is everything
The days of large IT transformation projects are over. In their place will be a new kind of IT transformation: smaller in scale, near-constant and more responsive to business needs — but with vast potential to revolutionise how IT is used by enterprises.
A second technology making a significant impact on solving Big Data problems is in-memory computing, which takes workloads that were traditionally resident on disk-based storage and moves them into main memory. This delivers a performance improvement many times above that which has been possible previously.
If supply chain experts can spend so much time and effort improving efficiency and still have more work to do, how are smaller companies meant to get their supply chains right? It’s not as if they have been standing still: CIOs at FMCG organisations and other companies of all sizes have long focused on using high-end supply chain management solutions to trim fat from their company supply chains. Many embarked upon massive enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations a decade ago as they stared down the end-of-life of existing systems and the spectre of the Y2K bug. Yet while their intentions were good, the same can’t be said for the methods of resolution.
It all started, as these things sometimes do, with a chicken.
What department heads and line managers think of HR, what employees think, and what HR managers think.
In the business world, describing your boss as “ape-like” is not typically considered a compliment. But it turns out there is a lot we can learn from chimpanzees about effective leadership. Applying human instincts to the corporate jungle can help IT leaders bring out the best from their team or manage technology change for end-users. Chimpanzees share 98 per cent of our DNA, making them more closely related to humans than gorillas. So it is little wonder that we have a lot in common.
Think of talent management and we immediately think of managing bright, high potential employees. But although ‘star talent’ individuals are important in any business, just managing stars is not enough. A high performing team means managers must understand the performance and contribution from all the team and manage the talent pool.
A ‘service’, of course, is an abstraction of the underlying functions, systems and policies used to deliver business outcomes. Service-centred IT therefore reflects the need for clarity and commonality of vision between business executives, the CIO, and the enterprise architects (EAs) and other operational staff charged with actually delivering that vision.
Within any organisation, however — below the its culture and style of management — there are similarities between not-for-profit and commercial organisations.
Like most Year 10 girls, Rebekah Eden never planned on a career in the IT industry. Popular culture had conditioned her to believe that IT was all about lonely individuals hunched over computers for hours and hours on end. Instead, her studies were taking her towards a preferred career in forensic science. It was exposure to the industry through a week-long EXITE (Exploring Interest in Technology and Engineering) camp organised by IBM that changed her mind. During that week she was shown different aspects of the IT industry, from programming robots to developing websites. The experience completely changed her mind.
Five years ago, Nokia dominated the smartphone market. How quickly things change. But before you sit back and think, ‘that won’t happen to me’, take a look at the competitive environment in which your company operates. Daunting, isn’t it?
The fact is that companies are increasingly using SOA to gain competitive business advantage. Distilled down to seven essential SOA practices, the following list enables IT professionals to tightly align ...
Developed by the CIO executive Council, Pathways is a unique, flexible, self-managed, self-paced 12-month CIO designed and delivered ...