Stories by Sue Bushell

A veteran in data warehousing and data management, Centrelink had to deliver the missing link: provide the right information at the right time to the right person in the right place

Strategic planning is back in a big way, with an increased emphasis on aligning IT planning with a company's business focus rather than simply putting together blueprints for catching up with technology advances

Wouldn't IT be sweet if you were the CIO of an information technology company? Find out, as the CIOs of IBM, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard provide a peek inside their candy stores

Which bank is en route to world's best practice? An innovative outsourcing deal between the Commonwealth Bank and EDS shows others how to think about the risks and rewards of a new kind of relationship.

Whom do you follow to become a leader? The paradoxical question makes sense for the CIO eager to open the doors to the executive suite

CIOs, usually ultra conservative when it comes to early adoption, are not only accepting the element of risk but are using it to spur on their efforts.

The Web can be a sticky place on your first fly by; with an ill-conceived plan you can get trapped

Now that more business executives are recognising the strategic importance of technology, the opportunity to leverage IT has never been greater. But delivering basic IT functionality remains a prerequisite for a CIO's success
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Like the weather, everyone seems to be talking about managing knowledge, but not doing much about it. Not only has law firm Phillips Fox done something, it's looking to "invent new knowledge"

Financial management at John Fairfax is based on the concept of "helping users to help themselves". The benefits aren't bottom-line focused, instead the payoff is employees' take-up of a self-service culture

There's been a lot of talk over recent times about "virtual communities" and "virtual classrooms".
But it's the "virtual customer" that's putting manufacturers into a spin as they try to weather the winds of change blowing them out of the post-industrial era and into a brave world of new competition.

Innovation has been rightly referred to as a "wave of creation destruction". Inevitably, traditional products, materials and production facilities will all become obsolete.
According to Professor Carl Pistorius, director of the Institute for Technological Innovation at the South African University of Pretoria, the inevitability of change means all companies should develop an innovation strategy.

According to inventor Thomas Edison, 'Genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.' Likewise, implementing knowledge management on an organisation-wide basis is no overnight project
When a major part of your duties involves steering the federal government clear of trouble on a range of contentious legal issues from Native Title Law to Security Law, corporate memory matters a lot.

In the world of IS management, it's not what you know; it's not even who you know. It's what you're called and where you work

Tapped for the CIO spot last October, Brian Crynes is making sure things go better with IT at Coca-Cola Amatil
He worked sorcery at Apple Computer, where as International CIO he conjured up a new-look, globally oriented IS team and then drew IT into fist-in-glove alignment with the business.