Aptly named, a company's help desk is primarily focused on resolving technology issues so the business as a whole can function successfully. Despite the best of intentions, however, help desks can put the company at risk by using legacy tools, shared passwords and incomplete security practices.

The Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) has issued a tender for a help desk contractor to support around 2500 researchers spread over seven sites across Australia.

The marketplace has matured, with CIOs and IT managers realising the Cloud is not hype anymore.

Relationships between the CIO and business executives will inevitably become strained, with broken promises and eroding trust. So how do you keep them from going completely off the rails?

Slowly but surely, many US companies are loosening their viselike grips on IT hiring and looking to add new staffers to bolster business growth in the year ahead.

If your help desk software is giving you trouble, there are some open source options available. In this part of CIO's five open source applications to watch we take a look at help desk software, which is the basis of incident response and IT service delivery.