Harvey Norman has finally kicked off an information technology transformation program to replace all of its core business systems over the next five years, but has again made it clear there are no immediate plans to embrace online retailing.
Project Reload, expected to cost in excess of $50 million, was originally expected to start early last year but was shelved because of uncertainty created by the global financial crisis.
The website of the North Shore City Council won five awards in the recent Association of Local Government Information Management’s (ALGIM) annual survey of council websites – including second place in the Supreme Web Award.
The council’s website was awarded first place in the best redeveloped website category, in both the expertly judged and People’s Choice divisions. It also got the top prize in the best new feature website – large council category, for its innovative online consenting solution, in both the expertly judged and People’s Choice divisions. As well, it secured second place in the Supreme Web Award, which was won by the Porirua City Council.
Tel.Con has been the leading conference addressing the needs of the New Zealand telecommunications sector over the past decade.
This year, Conferenz is partnering with research firm IDC to provide an event that will go into more details and deeper analysts into the key industry trends than ever before.
Project managers, instead of suffering income losses as with many other professionals, are earning more than they were two years ago before the height of the recession, reports the Project Management Institute.
The global median salary for project management practitioners is now US$90,260, with those holding Management Professional (PMP) credentials earning upwards of US$10,000 more than those without, in certain countries, reports PMI in its sixth Project Management Salary Survey.
I was talking to a colleague who works for a large technology vendor. His company offers products to enable IT organisations to construct cloud infrastructures inside their own data centres - to turn existing stable, static computing environments into ones that support scalability, agility, and dynamic applications. The company's progress on its products has been impressive, early implementations successful, and interest from their customer base (infrastructure groups within large IT organisations) high. However, he shared an apprehension with me regarding product adoption. "I'm concerned that while our customers are working on a very deliberate plan that will take a couple of years - doing their research, performing a pilot, evaluating the economics, making the capital investment business case - that the apps side of the house will just charge ahead using on-demand public cloud providers like Amazon." While he was worried about this trend from the point of view of how it will affect the prospects for his company's products, my mind moved toward a different outcome: the boomerang.
With regard to the issue he's worried about, my sense is that his concern is quite valid. Many software engineers have moved to cloud environments for development due to immediate resource availability and low cost. It's widespread. I noted in a blog post a few months ago my amusement regarding one large software vendor's senior executive's rant. He and I were both on a cloud computing panel and in his remarks he railed against developers using Amazon, citing intellectual property concerns. After the panel was over, as the participants were chit-chatting, he said that he found it frustrating because developers in his own company were using Amazon quite widely, despite being warned against it, because it was so much easier than getting computing resources through the official channels. The phrase "hoisted on one's own petard" sprang to my mind.
With news of CIO roles being disestablished or downsized becoming common, the recent executive changes at Telecom New Zealand have seen a raising of the profile and responsibility of its CIO, David Havercroft.
Havercroft has taken over and led the crisis team for all the recent XT outages, said Telecom CEO Paul Reynolds.
The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) has disestablished the CIO role.
David Spaziani is leaving first week of March following changes in the ICT infrastructure, which will be now under Stephen Crombie, general manager, government technology services.
Inland Revenue has disestablished the position of chief information officer.
A spokesman says two IT divisions have been created, one to focus on day-to-day business and the other on future IT requirements and strategy.
The massive dust cloud that turned Sydney red this week was blowing towards New Zealand last night.
A picture shot by NASA's Terra Earth-observation satellite yesterday morning, and processed by the Bureau of Meteorology, above, showed the brown cloud riding on a swirling low pressure system off New Zealand's west coast.
Semi-trailers barrelling up and down Australia’s highways and city streets are not the kinds of things eco-warriors look upon with warmth. In fact, it’s no doubt comforting for greenies to know that transport and logistics operator Linfox Logistics is among the first of several hundred companies that must reveal just how much pollution they produce.
But Linfox’s group manager for environment and climate change, David McInnes, isn’t worried at all. Tracking emissions is old hat for his company, which launched its CO2 monitoring program in 2007 – well before the National Greenhouse Emissions Reporting Scheme came into effect. What’s more, Linfox is one of the few Australian companies that has already given itself the ability to price carbon into its finance system, a key step in preparation for any emissions trading scheme.
Rod Oram, business journalist and professor of business at Unitec, presented a possible scenario for New Zealand in his keynote address at the IBM Insight Forum 2009 in Auckland on Thursday.
“Twenty years from now, a Kiwi, Prof Min Te Tua, wins the Nobel prize for her work on M3 – based on her research on building small, entrepreneurial global companies,” he said, of his fictional scenario.
Forget job fairs and spamming potential employers with your résumé. If you're looking for a new job, networking should be your primary job search strategy, according to the results of a recent survey by Challenger,
Gray and Christmas.
We constantly hear hype about how a given market is changing drastically. And given the economy, many companies we talk to tell us that the only thing drastic happening in IT services today is the rate reductions they're asking from their vendors. But after years of moving forward slowly, IT services is in fact about to change drastically. Here are a few reasons why, and what you can do about it.
Changing global demographics
Unisys’ local head of operations Terry Shubkin has left the company after more than eight years there, and the company says it is not replacing her.
She says her departure, which occurred in mid August, has been planned for about three months.
Few organisations can remain unscathed in this difficult economy. Thus, we wanted to find out how the economic slowdown is impacting the organisations in this year’s MIS100.
We asked the CIOs of the country’s top ICT using operations how the economic slowdown has affected three areas — their ICT budgets, projects and staffing levels (see graph A below).