As someone who is out in the field with corporate technology, talking with tech teams across a variety of industries, I've observed the deference that IT is starting to show to finance. With technology investments so tightly linked to a company's success, it only makes sense that the CFO would have a hand in developing IT's roadmap.
The chief financial officer is becoming the top technology decision maker in around half of businesses, according to Gartner research.
Organisations are looking to make the most of opportunities associated with the National Broadband Network (NBN), with Gartner Executive Program’s annual CIO agenda survey showing that networking, voice and data communications are a higher technology priority in Australia and New Zealand than globally.
In many ways CIOs are like nomads: They might set up camp for a short while, but before you know it they’re off in search of other pastures.
A Gartner analyst singled out the Inland Revenue Department for effectively using Facebook to inform people hit by the recent earthquake about tax relief, impact of a potential loss of tax records, changes in tax status and donation opportunities.
“This is a very good practice,” says Andrea de Maio, of the Inland Revenue - Canterbury Earthquake Facebook page. “No thrills and frills, no feedback allowed, no engagement for the sake of engagement, just a stream of very focused news and information of the kind one would expect from a revenue agency.”
Di Maio is a vice president at Gartner and his research focuses on the public sector particularly on e-government strategies and Web 2.0.
“A lot of government agencies around the world are using Facebook as a cooler (they wish!) alternative to their websites,” Di Maio writes in a recent blog. “As a consequence, the value added they provide is limited, which is reflected into low number of friends / followers and modest interaction.”
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A research commissioned by Microsoft has named New Zealand the most cloud savvy country in the Asia Pacific region.
According to Microsoft, 43 percent of respondents said they had a good understanding of cloud computing solutions, giving New Zealand an average score 3.3. out of 5, over one point higher than Thailand, Korea and Malaysia, with 2.6, 2.7 and 3.0, respectively.
What are the implications if Microsoft fails or falls behind in the tablet PC race, which at its current pace, is a decent possibility?
It’s no wonder IT leaders are focusing concern on IT infrastructure and operations costs when it accounts for 60 per cent of total IT spending. Since things are still uncertain despite the economy showing signs of improvement, this area of IT “strikes a resonant cord”, said Jay Pultz, vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner.
Budget goals
One critiOne critical shortage in the supply chain right now has nothing to do with Apple iPhones, Nintendo Wii
or Zhu Zhu Pets being out of stock for the holidays: It's the people who manage companies' supply chains.
In the new book The CIO Edge: Seven Leadership Skills You Need to Drive Results, the trio of authors argue that CIOs' leadership and people skills are the biggest determinate of their success - or failure.
The book, written by Graham Waller of Gartner Executive Programs, and Korn/Ferry's George Hallenbeck and Karen Rubenstrunk (formerly with Korn/Ferry's CIO practice), doesn't downplay the fact that CIOs still need to be operationally sound: keeping the proverbial trains running on time while managing to tight budgets.
What's atop CEOs' agendas for 2011? Gartner analysts recently outlined the top CEO concerns that CIOs will need to identify, understand and address.
Is your company's data under surveillance by foreign spybots looking for any competitive advantages or weaknesses they can exploit? This might sound farfetched, but such electronic espionage is real. It's an insidious security threat that's a lot more common than you probably realise.
As an IT or security executive, determining whether your organisation is under attack via this seemingly undetectable threat - and putting in place adequate technology and procedural safeguards - should be a high priority. The stakes are too high to ignore the problem.
Application development (AD) software revenue in Australia and New Zealand is expected to reach A$160.4 million (NZ$189.2 million), an increase of 6.7 percent from 2009 revenue of A$173.3 million (NZ$204.1 million) according to Gartner. Worldwide growth is expected to rise 0.7 percent.
Gartner principal research analyst Asheesh Raina says there is some pent up demand for AD products in the region.
“One of the main reasons for solid growth is the relative insulation from the worldwide economic recession, as well as sustained domestic consumption. Many markets across the globe continue to be in decline.”
According to Raina, ANZ is an area of spending growth and an attractive research and development centre for software vendors because of its rich demographics.
“Apart from growth opportunities, it also offers vendors long-term stability and the highest forecast compound annual growth rate for AD software for the five year period to 2013,” he says.
The ongoing need to invest in security testing is one of the top drivers for the application development market.
“Despite the restrictions imposed on AD spending due to the worldwide economic downturn, this segment grew fastest in 2009 as security breaches continued to highlight the need for good testing, making up for some of a lack of spending on more mature and less dynamic tools,” he says.
In 2009 AD market share results for ANZ, IBM held the share of 26.3 percent. This performance was helped by acquisitions such as Watchfire which provided growth in the security testing market.
HP held share of 15.3 percent while Microsoft had 13.4 percent.
Raina says HP’s share of the market remained fairly constant, whereas Microsoft’s market share grew slightly due to the company's preannouncement of Visual Studio 2010. This meant that many companies decided to postpone any upgrades and wait for the new version.
Cloud computing is one of the most-discussed topics among IT professionals today. And not too long into any conversation about the most highly touted cloud models - software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) - the talk often turns to cloud security.
According to Milind Govekar, an analyst at Gartner, cloud has rocketed up the list from number 16 to number two in Gartner's annual CIO survey of key technology investments. "Like with anything new, the primary concern is security," he says. In fact, the vast majority of clients who inquire about cloud, he says, would rather create a virtualised datacentre on their own premises - what some call a private cloud - because they're uncomfortable with the security issues raised by cloud computing and the industry's ability to address them.
Desktop virtualisation has a predicted growth curve that leaves much of the PC and IT services industries smiling: Yet none of the technologies or service providers promising to offer hosted virtual desktops are ready to step into key roles in enterprise IT infrastructures, according the same well-respected analysts who set the server virtualisation market on its ear with a similar conclusion last year.
"Very simply, none of the hosted virtual desktop providers can match the requirements for the enterprise," according to Chris Wolf, infrastructure analyst at The Burton Group (purchased recently by Gartner) who presented a critical report at last week's Synergy Citrix conference in Las Vegas.