Circular Head Council, based in the isolated region of far northwest Tasmania, is hoping a new document management system will provide at least part of the answer to its prayers for better retention of staff
One essential promise for Enterprise 2.0, or Web 2.0 for the enterprise, is making important information available to the people who need it, in large part by using blogs and wikis to capture and store institutional knowledge, says Dion Hinchcliffe, president and CTO of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 consultancy Hinchcliffe and Company, during his session at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston
In June, Coles Chief Executive John Fletcher went to bat for his CIO and the company's IT team via a letter to the editor after a comment piece appeared in The Australian Financial Review, which mooted that due diligence briefings had revealed "allegations of IT cost overruns and implementation delays which are said to be threatening the transformation of Coles' supply chain . . ." In a timely interview, Fletcher talks with CIO magazine's Beverley Head about the company's IT and his take on the controversy that arose during the takeover.
The relationship is much more sophisticated these days, throughout the corporate world. In Coles, technology requirements are defined by the business and IT working together, based on the business's strategic objectives.
No longer capable of remaining on the sidelines as a separate administrative domain, today's networked storage must be managed with a deeper awareness of business objectives.
Many enterprise customers are dragging their feet on adopting and implementing storage resource management (SRM) offerings, leaving their IT environments in danger of data overruns, capacity planning woes and poor storage strategy execution, according to a study by Forrester Research.
Chris Boebel, the director of information technology at Delta Sonic Car Wash Systems, had a big sales job on his hands
The PGA Tour would have needed a significant personnel and capacity boost for its data centre, including servers, storage, power and heating and cooling, to handle the eventual spikes in usage during each tournament at a cost that would have negated any potential revenue. On-demand computing provided the answer.
Call it the Data Centre Land Grab of 2007. Big-name companies like Microsoft, Google and HSBC have already ponied up hundreds of millions of dollars this year to stake their claim to acres of land across the country, their first step toward building state-of-the-art, next-generation data centres.
Procter & Gamble is famous for being innovative, but the hard truth is that it had better be. The company spends 3.4 percent of its revenue on R&D, more than twice the average of 1.6 percent in the consumer packaged goods industry. But big spending on R&D does not guarantee success: A study by consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton found no correlation between dollars spent on R&D and profitability. What matters is the productivity of that spend - the "hit rate" of ideas that lead to products.
The best ideas for your business might come from someone who doesn't even work for you. That's the contention made by author and consultant Don Tapscott in his newest book, <i>Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything</i>. Tapscott, along with co-author Anthony Williams (who teaches at the London School of Economics), believes that the pervasiveness of the Internet will usher in an era where companies will lower their proprietary barriers and collaborate to foster greater innovation. As people employ instant messaging, blogs, wikis and other Web-based applications to communicate and develop ideas, Tapscott believes the Internet will become a platform on which companies will be forced to seek external talent in order to solve their greatest challenges.
Business runs, by default, on e-mail. It's always there, and it just works, so we end up using it for everything - as a telephone, as a filing cabinet and as a conference room. But the trouble with e-mail is that it happily gobbles up our ideas, crucial documents and business acumen and doesn't give them back.
For all the profitability they currently enjoy, Australian companies have a "date with defeat" unless they stop inhibiting innovation and learn how to keep abreast of changes - at macro and micro levels - that are occurring at a faster pace than ever before, according to Jan Kolbusz, a serial entrepreneur who is probably best known to the ICT community for the time he spent as director of technology and operations at Sealcorp.
When Paul Tang first downloaded Google's desktop search application, he was impressed by its speed and power. Instead of painstakingly looking for data and files on his hard drive, he could find them with the ease of a Web search. However, Tang, chief medical information officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF), quickly realized that the slick application could also be dangerous.
Like most CIOs, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Colin Knowles recognizes the importance of information lifecycle management. What distinguishes Knowles's role as director of technology and distribution at the national broadcaster is how the strategic importance of managing information over its lifecycle forms a fundamental pillar of the organization's business.
Blogs provide a quick way to publish on the Web and even create an online version of a water cooler discussion. If that appeals to you, here's a piece on the basics of writing a blog.
Janet Brimson, head of the information management practice at independent IT services consultancy iFocus, warns that neglect of data quality management can cost government organisations millions in lost revenue, yet it is very rarely included in IT budgets.
A typical 10,000-square-foot (1000-square-metre) data centre consumes enough juice to turn on more than 8000 60-watt light bulbs.
Give a clear voice to the numbers that tell the story of your business.
Business intelligence has long been about spitting out data - often irrelevant and outdated - to a few big bosses. But today's BI is both more meaningful and more egalitarian. And it requires ever tighter alignment between IT and the business.
The formula for collaboration is changing rapidly.