The sabre-rattling over Russia’s hacking of the US election continued, with president-elect Trump conceding that Russia was probably responsible despite a report that left many questions unanswered.
Companies in Australia and New Zealand are well ahead of world pace in moving away from Windows XP – which is widely expected to become a security nightmare once Microsoft discontinues updates for the platform next Monday – but hundreds of thousands of regional PCs are still running the operating system, according to new statistics from Trend Micro.
Things were getting desperate at Westnet, an Internet service provider that was acquired by iiNet after building up a solid reputation based on award-winning customer service.
For a company in which 75 per cent of staff are direct customer sales representatives (CSRs), it’s essential that the contact centre work as efficiently as possible. However, the company's ageing contact centre management system had become increasingly inadequate as its CSR base swelled from 50 towards 250, and the critical task of rostering – essential to ensure enough people with the right skill sets are available at all times – was groaning under the company's Stone Age methods.
Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art relies on five major applications
to manage its collection, website, functions business, and other key
Uptime was just one of many challenges facing Phill Edwards as he worked to keep salary packaging specialist SmartSalary's 70-strong contact centre on top of rapidly growing customer demand.
Although the company embraced voice over internet protocol (VoIP) five years ago, its contact centre software was inelegant and prone to error. Yet with only six people in his IT organisation looking after about 180 employees, and any major software upgrade requiring the addition of several more, the chief information officer embraced a somewhat radical strategy for SmartSalary's contact centre.
There has always been something alluring about SOA (service oriented architecture), that collection of standards that simplifies and standardises the way various business systems talk to each other.
Linking different systems - especially old legacy systems that were never designed to play well with others - has always been a complex, frustrating and fragile process. Little wonder that the ability to standardise those conversations has caught the attention of countless companies that have spent years - and millions of dollars - bogged down in application integration.
When it comes to customer relationship management software, the market is awash with choices - and a huge number of companies are testing the water. Yet while managers may have a gut feeling that their CRM and self-service investments are paying off, those looking for concrete numbers may do better to ask not just whether the company is getting its money's worth, but whether its customers are, too.
Such questions have been front of mind for Hubb Financial Group, a Sydney-based investment house with tens of thousands of primarily individual investors spread around Australia, South-East Asia, India, the Middle East and the United States.
NSW and Victoria have both welcomed new state CIOs this year, but the rest of the country is watching to see if they can make a difference
The Holy Grail of the tech boom - according to some ironic historians with selective memories - was the paperless office. It was a noble aim that has never quite come to fruition. Straight-through processing (STP) is an ancestor of this ideal and has evolved, when properly implemented, into an extremely useful way of improving the handling of large volumes of data.
Although not a brand new concept, it has recently gained ground among profit-pressured companies looking for new ways to squeeze out inefficiency from their data handling.