change management - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• MIS100 2009: Top ten trends 2009

  1 The Recession: It’s official
  This year all senior ICT executives acknowledge the recession, but its impact varies.

• The premium event for New Zealand CIOs

  To highlight the importance of the CIO Summit, it is vital to recall the recent presentation of Peter Macauley, principal, end user practice, IDC NZ, on the evolving role of the CIO.
  Macauley, the chair of the 2009 conference, to be held at the Hyatt Hotel in Auckland on July 21 and 22, underscores the opportunities and threats for today’s CIOs:

• Confessions of a non-techie boss

  Trelise Cooper recalls the time when her fashion business had 20 staff and only one PC.
  Today, says Cooper, whose clothes are worn by celebrities across the globe, “IT is used in every part of the business”.

• Swine flu: How to make business continuity plans

  Speaking at the annual conference of The National Academy of Sciences Monday, US President Obama said that declaring the swine flu outbreak a national health emergency was a prudent measure and no reason for panic. He's getting regular updates and briefings from John Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism; Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security.

• Preparing for the year ahead

  2009 New Zealand CIO Summit
  21st & 22nd July 2009, Hyatt Hotel, Auckland

• A proactive move pays off

  Financial services group Suncorp has just completed a major desktop integration project across 50 locations in New Zealand, following its merger last year with Promina.
  The infrastructure project used Agile delivery principles more commonly associated with software development.

• Q&A with IBM's CIO

  Mark Hennessy speaks candidly on transforming the IT organization at IBM, fostering a culture of innovation, managing IT during the financial crisis, maximizing the value of social networking tools, and taking advantage of an imminent technological game-changer.
  How are you, as a CIO, responding to the current difficult financial situation on an immediate and longer term basis?

• Leading through a downturn

  Being more agile and managing change will be key for CIOs in the current economic climate according to the latest Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) Technology report.
  “This current forecast is all about agility,” says Paul Nickels, IT risk management partner at PwC New Zealand. Nickels says a lot of the traditional management theories are quite linear in terms of how they are constructed. “We need to move away from some of those aspects to be more agile.”

• Legislation change a pain for small businesses

  Results of a MYOB Colmar Brunton survey state 37 per cent of local businesses are struggling to keep up with legislation changes.
  More than 500 businesses with less than 20 employees took part in the business pain points survey.

• Major IT project up at Ports of Auckland

  Peter Bakker is set to head the biggest IT project at Ports of Auckland after 23 years in IT.
  Bakker came to New Zealand as a teenager from Holland and in a career focused on IT development, has had roles at Zespri International where he helped implement SAP, Air New Zealand and ASB Bank, where he was latterly GM technology, strategy and planning in its Sovereign Insurance division.

• Pulp friction

  As a directory service, Yellow Pages was knee deep in paper contracts. Every one of the entries in the massive volumes for Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and other cities and regions had its own separate contract and paper trail. Each entry requires some discussion with the customer, and, if there are problems with any listing, details need to be confirmed and seen to immediately. With nearly 500,000 contracts per annum, held for three years or more, that’s a lot of paper to push around. As well, paper records require expensive storage space and are difficult to immediately locate and process. Even more important is the time spent in searching for documents when customers call to talk about their contracts. On a daily basis, the company receives more than 900 inbound enquiries from existing and new customers regarding the details of contracts. These calls are handled by 40 call centre staff that need to locate the related documents and refer to them.
  Before 2005, Yellow Pages used offsite repositories of physical documents to handle its paper load. The process of storing and retrieving documents was cumbersome and did not yield the benefits of immediate electronic access. “We would record the details of each contract and then would box up the paper and send it off to a storage company,” says CFO Greg Hurn. “If a customer needed to see that contract we would have to contact the storage company, then someone would have to physically visit their storage facility to get the document. The whole process took three days. So, we needed to change things to achieve greater efficiency as well as reducing expense.”

• Telecom's Greg Patchell resigns

  Greg Patchell, Telecom’s group general manager, technology and shared services, has left the company “to pursue new opportunities”, says Telecom.
  CIO understands the nearest to a replacement for Patchell could occupy a retitled position slightly lower on the company hierarchy. No one has yet been named for the post.

• New CIOs at ING and HSBC

  A spate of senior-level technology departures at St George Bank has continued with the institution's acting chief information officer, Greg Booker, jumping ship to head a two-year technology overhaul at wealth-management and insurance company ING Australia.
  INGA, a joint venture between Dutch banking giant ING and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, yesterday named Mr Booker as its CIO to head an operational revamp of the organisation, a move followed by the announcement of other senior IT hirings.

• The fixers

  The company has already gone through two CIOs this year, and it's only April 1. During the job interview, the CEO tells you that you have six months to turn IT around, because the company is being positioned for sale. And by the way, feel free to fire all 50 current IT staffers.
  Would you take this job? Terry Knecht did.

• Taking the big leap

  More than a year ago, Peter Burggraaff met the representatives of HCL as CIO of Farmers when the outsourcing company bid for a contract with the retail group.
  HCL did not get the contract, but Burggraaff stayed in touch with them. “I felt they had a huge potential in a country like this.”