Stories by Rodney Gedda

It may be tough to convince CEOs and the board the value of social media, but marketing and IT staff shouldn’t spend too much time planning or risk "over thinking" the strategy and losing ground.

What do IT and marketing people do if their CEO and other senior managers are stultifying the use of social media? Show them case studies and examples of how other C-level executives are using it to their advantage, say leading social media professionals from Telstra and Facebook.

AMP will hold its annual Amplify innovation event this week and IT leaders will exchange crowdsourced ideas with the rank and file. CIO, Lee Barnett, spoke with CIO about how IT and business can benefit from all variety of industries.

Organisations looking to promote their brand through social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn should manage it with internal resources to avoid outsourcing the public image of the company, according to representatives from Facebook and Telstra.

Mobile handset maker Sony Ericsson has announced its Xperia Play Android will be available from Telstra and Optus from June 8.

The National Library of Australia’s Trove search engine project has taken out the 2011 Excellence in eGovernment Award and the Service Delivery Category Award at the CeBIT 2011 ICT Celebration Dinner in Sydney last night.

The success of an electronic medical records (EMR) project will depend on a level of high-velocity, mission-critical ICT not seen before in the sector, says the NSW Department of Health’s director of e-health and ICT strategy branch Ian Rodgers.

Financial services organisations might be conservative when it comes to moving core functions to the Cloud, but that hasn’t stopped the industry from embracing as many as 20 Cloud services already, according to an IT strategist at BT Financial Group.

IT industry professionals, analysts and vendors all have their unique ideas when it comes to describing what Cloud computing means, but according to one infrastructure leader it’s just like ordering a pizza.

The CIO of Telstra has taken the unusual step of personally writing a job ad. Patrick Eltridge wants to hire experienced Agile process coaches for a change program he sees as exciting and rewarding.

French software company BonitaSoft has released version 5.5 of its Bonita Open Solution, an open source Business Process Management (BPM) suite, adding more development and testing tools.

In an effort to reduce some $50 million a year in trolley collection and replacement costs, retailer Woolworths has launched a mobile application that allows people to report a lost trolley, including its location via GPS.

A day after announcing the HTC Desire S and Wildfire S Android handsets, Telstra has indicated it will offer the high-end Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone in July, but won’t say for how much.

The next release of the open source KDE desktop environment won’t overhaul its interface but more features and stability is the way as the first 4.7 beta is now available for download.

Telstra has announced the availability of the HTC Desire S smartphone, the successor to its most popular Android handset, the HTC Desire, on its $59 Freedom Connect plan and the new Wildfire S is coming in July for $360 outright.