While most Australian telcos have CIOs presiding over dedicated IT departments, mobile network operator, Virgin Mobile, has unified its project management, IT and customer service business units under the guise of its chief operating officer, Matt Anderson.
With 5000 staff, 600 stores, 7.5 million customers and $4.4 billion in revenue, the merged Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) has consolidated its project management office around one core application which it is now integrating with other business systems.
The former CIO of Google and founder and CEO of ZestCash, Dr Douglas Merrill, says companies stuck in traditional management practices risk becoming irrelevant and leaders should not be afraid to do 'dumb' things.
NSW Health has started preparing the consolidation of all its disparate email systems into one Microsoft Exchange environment for some 200,000 end-users across the state government department with the big loser being Novell’s GroupWise.
To prepare for the migration, the health support services (HSS) infrastructure office within NSW Health is installing a centralised email archiving system based on Quest Archive Manager specifically for the GroupWise environments.
The new archiving solution will address “pressing GroupWise storage capacity concerns” and allow the historical GroupWise email to be centrally stored and accessed without a dependency on GroupWise itself.
HSS anticipates the new email archive system will be switched on in August 2011.
Last month the NSW Department of Health’s director of e-health and ICT strategy branch Ian Rodgers, said there is a renewed focus on the IT systems and infrastructure strategy which needed to be modernised to support the electronic medical records (EMR)[3] programs.
Although NSW Health has been planning to migrate to Exchange for some time, this move strikes another blow for Novell’s GroupWise which has to compete with the Microsoft juggernaut both on-premise and in the Cloud. Last year the Australian National Maritime Museum migrated off GroupWise to Exchange in the Cloud.
Many New Zealand organisations have made the move from GroupWise to Exchange in recent years, including ACC, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, and the Waikato District Health Board.
Novell was acquired by Attachmate last year.
- Additional reporting by David Watson
Melbourne-based retailer The Just Group has implemented a Bluetooth wireless stocktaking solution for its network of clothing stores Australia-wide.
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.
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.
A new survey indicates more traditional business marketing money is being spent on social media activities, including using the public services to build customer relationships, not just to drum up publicity.
The United States Government has open sourced the IT Dashboard project, a web-based application designed to track IT spending used by CIOs of government agencies.
The IT Dashboard is an online portal (http://www.itdashboard.gov/IT Dashboard[1]) where federal government agencies and the public can view details of IT spending and project management.
Launched in June 2009 by President Barrack Obama, IT Dashboard includes general information on more than 7000 IT investments and detailed data for some 800 “major” investments across 27 federal agencies.
IT Dashboard is an extension to the open source Drupal content management system and uses the MySQL database.
The initial code release was posted on the SourceForge.net open source portal[2] last week making it available to all governments.
Designed for use by government departments, there’s no reason why government businesses, including the likes of NBN Co, can’t also benefit from the software.
Agency CIOs are responsible for evaluating and updating select data through interfaces provided by IT Dashboard.
Each project carries a CIO “rating” where the CIO rates each investment using a set of pre-established criteria.
“As a rule, the evaluation should reflect the CIO's assessment of the risk and the investment's ability to accomplish its goals,” according to IT Dashboard.
Evaluation factors include risk management, requirements management, contractor oversight, historical performance, human capital and other factors the CIO deems important to forecasting future success.
Last year Computerworld Australia reported on the increasing popularity of the Drupal CMS[3] among Australian government agencies, including the Prime Minister’s office, so from a technology standpoint a local IT Dashboard implementation is possible.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) will expand its Oracle Sun hardware and software installation and set up a supplier panel for future upgrades and support services, all with the blessing of the CIO.
Data security is always top of mind for CIOs and CSOs, and there is no shortage of challenges when it comes to picking the right tool for the job. With network and software vulnerabilities growing at a perpetual rate, good security software can help defend against many of the large-scale threats that occur locally and from all over the Internet. In this edition of 5 open source things to watch, we take a look at security products that will guard against threats without robbing your kitty.
British Telecommunications has opened a customer showcase in Sydney in an effort to woo more enterprises to its new cloud infrastructure and services portfolio as the company celebrates 25 years in Australia.
<strong>Find a balance between productivity and maintenance</strong>
Open source software has a long history in lower-level network software so it's not surprising there is a healthy range of free tools available for network and systems management.
The new paradigm of mobile banking carries with it inherent risks, but there’s no reason for consumers to be less confident about the security of their data if the right safeguards are in place, says the chief technology officer (CTO) of Westpac bank.