Stories by Shaun Drummond

Charlie Elias is no stranger to tough jobs. The formative years of his career, when he was in his 20s, included spending four years working for Deloitte’s receivership practice during the 1990s recession.
“My days spent in the receivership area provided a fantastic business grounding,” he says. As for all companies in recent years, the focus in a turnaround was always cash first. “When the receiver I worked for called me up, he’d ask how the cash balance was going,” Elias says. “There was no discussion about earnings – [it was]: ‘Have you paid your suppliers?’; ‘Have you collected your cash from your customers?’ 

AT GE Capital Australia and New Zealand, the global financial crisis forced chief financial officer Mark Toohey and chief information officer Matt Mansour, along with their fellow executives, to introduce a different way of managing IT investment.
As a United States-based company, GE Capital was severely affected by the GFC. Toohey says the significantly tougher hurdles for return on investment that head office then introduced meant the local arm's old practice of putting up individual projects for approval wouldn't be accepted any more.

Finding the electronic needle in the haystack is a major frustration for businesses and individuals alike as they amass virtual mountains of data. It's one reason Google has been so successful and it is one of the main reasons why Adelaide-based Calvert Technologies - which designs, supplies and supports PC-based networks - installed new workflow planning software.
"As businesses grow, they get more people and information that they need to keep track of," Calvert's managing director, Dean Calvert, explains. "One of the problems is that you get silos of information.

Flexibility soothsayers promise the corporate world that eventually we will be able to work anywhere, any time, and thereby greatly improve productivity. But as with fixed networks, to do anything more interesting with a mobile device requires faster and more reliable service.
Despite the fact that pocket-sized devices that take pictures, shoot video and access internet and email have been available for years, it has hardly been worth the bother - beyond voice, email and text - until now. Speeds are just becoming available that allow the phone to be used to its full potential.

At engineering consultants Sinclair Knight Merz, the finance and human
resources teams have been working to improve their communication with