Business Processes

IT departments have often identified closely with their critical vendors. Using a Microsoft platform made you a PC shop; your ERP choice made you an Oracle or SAP shop. The servers you used aligned you with Sun, Microsoft or IBM.

Accounting and ERP software vendor, Attache Software, has released a guide for small to medium businesses aimed at improving the use of IT within their organisations.

Life insurance giant AccuQuote has recorded an increase in productivity and a decrease in material costs thanks to an organisation wide move to unified communications and business process automation (BPA).

While business process management (BPM) has traditionally been about automating office and departmental workflows, Oracle is looking to put humans back into the loop, at least in an advisory capacity.

Since we're nearing the end of the 2010 planning cycle, it's as good a time as any to review how we plan projects and whether our processes are as effective as they could be. IT planning never truly ends and tends to eat up more time than we think. As a result, CIOs and their teams have an opportunity to lead the charge to get leaner in planning.

As part of our coverage of the CIO Summit 2009, we bring you the whole CIO panel discussion. Topics include the effect the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is having on CIOs, the role of trust in an organisation and collaboration with the business.

The US government warnings about tainted imports from China are ominous and ongoing. In July 2007 poisonous chemicals were found in toothpaste. This was just a month after imports of farm-raised Chinese seafood and lead paint in Thomas the Tank Engine toy trains were detained. And May had seen contaminated pet foods sicken and kill thousand of US cats and dogs. Now its humans, when earlier this month every parents' nightmare became a reality: Melamine contaminated infant formula poisoned more than 50,000 Chinese infants and resulted in at least four deaths.

When I started in IT at insurance company MetLife in 1970, my background was as far away from insurance as you could possibly imagine. I was an engineer, and I had studied towards a doctorate in solid-state physics.

Social networking outlets such as MySpace and Facebook are offering new avenues of communication for corporations and governments, but are also presenting fresh challenges to CIOs deciding how best to fit them into their business processes. Dave Nikolejsin, CIO for the Government of British Columbia, discusses his own experiences thus far in the world of Web 2.0.

Meyer (Sandy) Frucher, CEO of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX), loves a good story. He tells them easily, like one might tell a friend or spouse about the day at work. Even when he's pressed for time, he weaves a juicy plot and leaves listeners begging for the conclusion. With this in mind, it seems only natural that Frucher relies on an anecdote to explain the importance of IT in his organization.

Many automation projects measure success on basic ROI metrics: That's not enough. The smartest IT leaders are measuring the business impact of these projects, says CA's Stephen Elliot. Here's his advice on how to do that, bring your team together and lay a foundation for business growth.

I have a slightly unusual background in that I spent much of my time on the end-user side of the fence before setting up as a software vendor. The gulf between the vendor and the enterprise buying community can be seen by the term which software vendors use for their customers: "users". There is only one other industry that I am aware of that names its customers in the same way, and that is the narcotics industry.

That the PR hordes at Microsoft would begin the jungle drumbeat for the next version of Windows within an ace of the launch of Vista was, of course, to be expected. The company's default position whenever challenged about its latest products has always been to pique the appetite for the next version through calculated leaks, the drawing up of roadmaps, the tossing around of code names and the issuing of possible feature details. This predictable tactic is rearing its head again with a steady stream of stories appearing in the media: Google News today lists 862. The question is: why do we play along?

Back in the last century, when business and society changed more slowly, companies could afford to take their time fine-tuning their operations. Today, the marketplace rewards those companies that change most quickly