Stories by Averill Dickson

Watch out, for the legal rules in this area will only get firmer and tighter.

Despite the apparent nearness of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, the contents are still largely cloaked in secrecy, with no official drafts available.

In tech hotspots such as Silicon Valley, employee option schemes are commonly used in high-growth companies to incentivise talented people. Here is a guide to find out whether this option is right for your company, and what are areas to watch out for.

For organisations that have implemented formal substantiality/environmental policies, green procurement will already be a focus of ICT departments. However, even without this level of corporate commitment, attention to green procurement in ICT can provide significant organisational benefits.
Green procurement items that I have seen specified in recent RFPs and purchasing contracts include:

In the current low-unemployment environment, recruiting and retaining skilled IT staff has become one of the key business issues facing CIOs. In this article I will look at a couple of strategies and tools that I have seen successfully utilised to address this issue.
Lawyers often start with definitions, and my first recommendation is therefore to ensure that you have defined what is expected from a particular role. This should include an overview of the role by way of job description, but also short-term or task-focused expectations set by way of a yearly (or even six-monthly) goal setting process. A common situation I encounter when an employment relationship is in trouble (eg an employer wants to commence a disciplinary process, or where employment has been terminated) is a complaint from the employer that the employee wasn’t performing to expectations, accompanied by a complaint from the employee that they were working hard but didn’t know what was expected of them, or that they thought they had done an excellent job but the employer never seemed happy. Having clearly defined job descriptions and work objectives helps eliminate this gap — employees know what employers want, can direct their efforts towards those objectives and both parties can measure the outcomes against those objectives.