Stories by Brad Howarth

The utilities sector has been quick to adopt the real-time vision, particularly those organisations that have made an early move to smart grid deployments. Australian-born CIO, Joe Locandro, says the organisation has long used real-time monitoring — or what it calls condition-based monitoring — for its power plants and infrastructure. Thousands of sensors measure variables such as vibration, heat and voltage consistency, and feed them into OSIsoft’s PI System enterprise infrastructure management software.

Health insurance company, HCF, initially implemented QlikView to create a monthly report for its chief executive.

The massive explosion in data volumes collected by many organisations has brought with it an accompanying headache in terms of putting it to gainful use. Businesses increasingly need to make quick decisions, and pressure is mounting on IT departments to provide solutions that deliver quality data much faster than has been possible before. The days of trapping information in a data warehouse for retrospective analysis are fading in favour of event-driven systems that can provide data and enable decisions in real time.

While pundits and politicians debate the cost and benefits of the National Broadband Network, a much broader discussion is playing out on the global stage.

If your role involves managing IT within an organisation, starting a new job often means inheriting a hodgepodge of other people’s decisions strung together across generations of technology. The alternative is to join a start-up, but rarely does a start-up match the resources and budget that are afforded to IT in large existing organisations. So what if you could start from scratch without disrupting the business that you service?

Australian CIOs may be thankful this year’s flu season was relatively sparing on their employees, but many have themselves become the source of another form of infection within their business - the ever growing call for more robust business intelligence.

What a difference a year makes. Twelve months ago it was almost impossible to find Australian organisations that had embraced cloud computing. Now pretty much everyone is planning, piloting or executing some form of migration to the cloud. If there was ever doubt that cloud was little more than hype, it was eradicated in April 2010 by Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) group executive for enterprise services and chief information officer, Michael Harte. In a speech to Committee for Economic Development in Australia, Harte declared that never again did he wish to be locked into using proprietary hardware or software and cloud computing was his escape route.

The Commonweath Bank of Australia CIO and group executive for enterprise services, Michael Harte, is serious about cloud computing. CBA wants to buy software and infrastructure as a service over a network and Harte sits on the Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council. In this extensive interview, he talks to CIO about his cloud computing strategy and the opportunity it presents to break vendor lock and create contestability.

Adoption of mobile technology by Western Australia Police has resulted in faster investigations, safer working conditions and more police on the streets. WA Police’s mobile data strategy commenced two years ago with the deployment of its own data network across 10,000 square kilometres of the Perth metropolitan area, providing access to in-vehicle computer systems and to citizen records, including pictures.

When it comes to getting closer to your customers, Ryan Klose says nothing beats mobile technology. As chief information officer for Australia at the global wine and spirits group, Pernod Ricard, Klose is getting applications for Blackberries and iPhones into the hands of sales representatives, major customers, winemakers and consumers. And it seems to be working.

For the Australian liquor buying cooperative Independent Liquor Group, solving its printing requirements also requires the cooperation of its 12,000 customers.

The technologies of scanning and optical character recognition have been used by businesses since the 1990s, but are increasingly being called upon in support of a newer concept called the digital mailroom. The idea is that wherever possible, incoming documents are scanned and their data extracted and fed into workflow processes for faster handling. Melbourne-based superannuation fund VicSuper is amongst the latest to take the plunge, installing a large-scale scanner from GBC for its mailroom. Documents are opened by the device and scanned with minimal intervention from human operators, with data extracted by EMC’s Captiva content management software.

CIOs are finding that getting printing under control not only saves money, it opens the door to thinking about their printing requirements more strategically

Meet the IT pros who keep Australia’s biggest concerts and plays on stage, on the road and online.

Social networks, e-readers and other technologies are transforming the publishing industry and heralding a new era of reading and learning.