Supply chain management in Australia - Part 1
It all started, as these things sometimes do, with a chicken.
It all started, as these things sometimes do, with a chicken.
Like most new technology trends, Cloud computing has been pitched to enterprises as offering nothing less than a total business transformation, the cure for the common cold, and a raison d’etre for IT executives struggling for meaning now that they’ve virtualized their entire technology infrastructures.
Despite its value, TOGAF can suffer from intrinsic shortcomings in the process by which EAs are selected and trained.
Despite years spent trying to encourage staff to think along business lines, many CIOs are still finding technology-focused EAs unable to think in business terms, and vice versa. Even though CIOs most certainly know better, Gartner figures suggest that just 9 per cent of enterprise architecture efforts will be built around business goals this year, with that figure growing to just 30 per cent by 2016.
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.
Adding new layers for both improved communications and business-focused data analysis may add pressure to already pressured CIOs, but information executives aren’t the only ones staring down organisational change as a result of the industry’s new information-driven dynamics.
Smart meters have a way to go. The recent 2010 Australian Smart Grid Study, a survey of 13 Australian utilities by sector consultancy Logica, showed an average self-reported maturity rating of just 2.14 on a scale of 1 to 5, and communications networks to support them rated 2.80.
Like any entrepreneur, Andrew Dyer is excited about the possibilities for his clean-energy venture, BrightSource Energy. The company, of which he is a director, is this year partnering with energy giant Chevron to cover 1000 acres of the US desert with 4000 mirrors that reflect sunlight onto three boilers mounted atop each of three 100 metre towers.
Agile developers often refer to the collaboratively-developed Agile Manifesto, which outlines 12 core principles
Many organisations consider Agile development as a nice-to-have way of improving their efficiency and driving change. For document management provider Aconex, however, the adoption of Agile was a lifeline after its operations faced almost paralysing pressures from an increasingly complex product, ever more-demanding customers and sales staff, and heady growth that has propelled the Melbourne startup into 35 countries.
A recent five-month effort to complete a business intelligence (BI) project for an internal division marked a major turning point for life reinsurer, RGA Australia, as its developers charged forward with an Agile-driven methodology that replaced traditional bottom-up development processes with an iterative effort to see how much could be done within a five-month timeframe.
CIOs and project managers talk about Agile in the trenches - the good, the bad and the ugly.
Extreme traffic loads require extreme measures, as Microsoft found out while building the official Commonwealth Games Web site over the past year.
The opening last week of the National Intelligent Transport Systems Centre in Port Melbourne has been a labour of love for technology sponsor NEC Business Solutions.
Tsunami, bombings, hurricanes - the past year's disasters have been a wake-up call for Australia's government risk management practitioners.