Stories by Mark Phillips

It’s been 30 years since the advent of the IBM Personal Computer, but according to IBM designer Dr Mark Dean, who worked on the original 5150, the days of the PC are now numbered.

Just as enterprise starts to embrace social media as a potentially value-adding business tool, everyday users are beginning to show signs of what has been dubbed ‘social media fatigue’.

Global financial institutions have identified emerging mobile platforms as a major revenue growth opportunity as they fight to counter threats from non-traditional sources.

They were once ubiquitous in the workplace, as much a symbol of executive status as the gold standard in enterprise mobile communications. Research in Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry devices held all the corporate aces and with unrivalled high-end security features, their appeal to and grip on the enterprise sector seemed impregnable.

Monash University, Australian Defence Organisation, Australian Electoral Commission and the Doric Group are just some of the finalists in this year’s IT service management (ITSM) awards.

US-based not-for-profit Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has unveiled a free initiative designed to encourage transparency of security practices within Cloud providers.

Asia-Pacific insurers are planning to increase their IT budgets in 2011–2012 and -- interesting for an industry that is traditionally slow to adopt new technologies -- 43 per cent of respondents in a new study have already deployed or are experimenting with private Cloud.

At this week’s Gartner Summit in Sydney a suggestion that by 2016, 20 per cent of all business organisation’s IT will be purely Cloud-based was put to delegates and a panel of IT gurus. Roughly 70 per cent of an audience of around 250 agreed with the prediction. Here’s some of what the panel had to say.

With demand for skilled technology professionals now exceeding supply, in a bid to retain their top talent employers will be awarding average salary increases of 3-4 per cent through 2011 and 2012.

The case for a National Broadband Network (NBN) has been given a fillip by research findings that show by 2015 there will be an almost six-fold increase in internet traffic in Australia.

If there is one top-of-mind issue among CIOs today, it is Cloud computing. But how will it be positioned five years from now — as an innovation that brought about overriding change in the way IT delivers business service or, as some predict, something responsible for nothing more than incremental change to the familiar hosting arrangements and one that back in 2011 was wrapped in massive hype?

Australian bricks and mortar retail chains may have their backs against the wall in the face of cheaper international online offerings, but their general lack of an online presence over the last decade is also to blame.

Both share the common objective of growing the business, but rifts between CIOs and CMOs are commonplace -- the result of misconceptions and outdated, stereotypical views about the other’s priorities. One is seen to have a short-term focus, the other long-term. One is the left brain of the organisation, the other the right.

AptiQuant, a Vancouver-based psychometric consulting company, this week released a report that claimed to measure the effects of cognitive ability on the choice of Web browser. The company said it offered free online IQ tests to over 100,000 people and then plotted the average IQ scores based on the browser in which the test was taken.

Therapy Focus, Rocky Bay, The Centre for Cerebral Palsy and Disability Services Commission are working in partnership on a pilot program that increases the availability of low-cost equipment for people with disabilities.