Features

• Working with HR - Part 3

  By Tim Mendham | 19 August, 2011 07:00

  What department heads and line managers think of HR, what employees think, and what HR managers think.

• Working with HR - Part 2

  By Tim Mendham | 18 August, 2011 11:37

  Stephanie Christopher, national director of SHL Australia New Zealand, a company which assists companies — including recruitment firms — in their recruitment activities, says that for the more technical positions HR has to fill, “it would lean toward the line manager for advice; it would be the line manager who would have final say”.

• Working with HR - Part 1

  By Tim Mendham | 17 August, 2011 13:50

  Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: “Managers aspire to be strategic, but they are required to fulfil their duties as a functional expert.”

• Leading through human instincts

  By Caitlin Fitzsimmons | 08 August, 2011 10:28

  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 Tank: Managing the talent pool

  By Hemant Kogekar | 13 July, 2011 09:04

  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.

• The leadership formula: IQ + EQ +SQ - EGO

  By Darren Horrigan | 24 June, 2011 09:41

  It is said that the best business leaders know EI is the killer app.

• The leadership formula: IQ + EQ +SQ - EGO

  By Darren Horrigan | 23 June, 2011 12:34

  Imagine your four-year-old self in a room with an adult who offers you a marshmallow. As you reach for the sweet, she says if you wait while she runs an errand, you can have two when she returns. She departs, and leaves behind the marshmallow. Do you weaken, or hold out for double the treat? Psychologists would have us believe that the children who sit tight are showing early signs of high achievement in later life. They say the ability to delay gratification is a master skill; a triumph of reason over impulse. Some claim such self-control is one of the five elements of superior emotional intelligence, a main ingredient of leadership.

• Leading change - Part 2

  By Brad Howarth | 07 April, 2011 06:00

  There are strong economic and business performance arguments driving the desire to see more women enter the IT workforce. The diversity and workforce lead for IBM Australia and New Zealand, Belinda Curtis, points to several studies demonstrating stronger corporate performance when women represent a high proportion of senior leadership or board positions.

• Leading change - Part 1

  By Brad Howarth | 06 April, 2011 06:00

  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.

• Harness disruption or become obsolete: Forrester

  By Georgina Swan | 05 April, 2011 18:03

  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?

• CIOs talk about staying strategic

  By Georgina Swan | 08 August, 2010 09:00

  It’s the bête noire of C-level managers the world over — too often, it’s easy to be pulled into the morass of day-to-day issues at the expense of strategy. If the role is predominantly operational, fair enough, but being forced into operations when you were hired to be strategic (or vice versa) is frustrating for everybody involved. So how do CIOs balance operations and strategy? Aligning the departmental business plan with the organisation’s strategic plan is an obvious starting point. Beyond that, however, CIOs have developed their own methods of staying strategic.

• Your Leadership Portfolio: The View from C-level

  By Steve Kelner and Chris Patrick | 24 July, 2010 07:45

  Former senior IT leaders who rise to head of the function are often surprised by the competencies that they are expected to have at the C-level.

• The quest for IT talent

  By Darren Horrigan | 07 June, 2010 09:25

  That noise you hear is the scrape of chairs being pushed back, laptops snapping shut and your ICT staff walking out the door. The war for talent is on again — if it ever stopped — and as with all wars, there will be victors, survivors and casualties. Identifying, retaining and developing talent never gets easier. There are only degrees of difficulty. What should you do to attract and groom good people? How can you make your IT organisation one that offers interesting roles and compelling career prospects? How can you avoid becoming collateral damage in the war?

• Take On Leadership Challenges For a CIO Role

  By Stephanie Overby | 07 May, 2010 06:06

  Ask Paul J. Capizzi about his career plans and he'll tell you, "I'm taking the stairs, not the elevator." It's an unlikely admission from the fast-talking New Yorker, who, at 36, has already risen to the number-two spot in IT at insurer SBLI USA.

• How to Make Time for Strategy

  By Martha Heller | 23 April, 2010 04:46

  Last week I asked a CIO roundtable which elements of the CIO Paradox they found most challenging. One item that showed up on every CIO's top-three list was "You were hired to be strategic, but you are forced to spend most of your time on operational issues." I spoke to five of the Council's most strategy-minded CIOs about how they managed to get out of the operational morass.