Stories by Divina Paredes

As chief information officer of BMC Software, Mark Settle says two things make his role “unusual”. The first is providing ICT support for 6000 employees across the globe, of which half are in research and development. The latter involves supporting servers and storage devices in the R and D laboratories in different parts of the world — four in the US, and one each in Israel and India.
The second is that his team is also an internal showcase for BMC products, meaning they use all versions of BMC products internally, and meet with end customers. “This gives us a unique ability to provide feedback to the R and D people about the actual practical issues that we run into,” Settles says during a recent visit in Auckland.

How can we support the introduction of new services while avoiding the disruption of existing services? How can I reduce costs while improving services? How will I balance the need to influence business strategy with the need to provide top-notch IT support?
In January to April this year, IBM interviewed more than 2500 CIOs across the globe on the daily demands they face. And from the hour-long interviews, the above questions emerged as those that CIOs are asking themselves on an ongoing basis.

“We looked at what the business wanted to achieve and thought about that from an IT perspective,” says Brett Priddey, manager architecture strategy and analysis at the Wellington City Council (WCC). “We are not developing new strategies. We can do smart stuff, but it has to be in a context with what the business is trying to do.”
Priddey is describing how ICT actively supports the WCC-designated strategy to position the country’s capital as an “affordable, internationally-competitive city”.

The world is thought to have gone through the worst of the economic meltdown, but companies can expect the next five to 10 years to be vastly different from the past decade.
This is the message from Microsoft chief financial officer Chris Liddell in his keynote speech at this year’s Tech Ed in Auckland.

Successful CIOs blend three pairs of roles. While these roles seem contradictory, they are actually complementary.
This is the conclusion of IBM in its first Global Chief Information Officer Survey with more than 2500 CIOs interviewed worldwide between January and April 2009.

After completing a 12-kilometre course that included crossing swamps and crawling under barbed wire, Pat O’Connell and Jonathan Iles are tackling a more difficult terrain. This November, they will climb the four highest peaks in the North Island and encounter snow and ice on the way.
O’Connell and Iles who are CIOs, respectively, of Rank Group and its subsidiary Carter Holt Harvey, along with the third member of their team Glenda Mullany of The Tango Group, are doing this to raise money for the The Kia Timata Ano Trust, a women’s refuge in the Rodney district, north of Auckland. Mullany is a board member of the trust.

CIOs have to brace themselves for unprecedented pressures in the next four years, which will make the changes of the past two decades seem mild.
This is the brief of a PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) report on ‘the next generation CIO’, which covered 667 senior executives.

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.

To the viewing public, broadcast free-to-air television is essentially about breaking news, reality TV, sitcoms, movies, sports and other forms of entertainment.
Damian Swaffield has quite a different perspective.

Your network is the amount of people you know. That is your personal brand; grow it regardless of the economic situation, advises former Merrill Lynch stockbroker turned strategic communications consultant Mark Jeffries.
At last week’s SAS Premier Business Leadership Series in Singapore, Jeffries shares what he calls the “three Rs of networking” – radar, reach and reward.

There are two ways to approach the time when the economy turns around from its current slowdown, says Jim Davis, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of SAS.
The first is to wait for the recession to end and then do business as usual. The second is to use this opportunity to retool the organisation and acknowledge the fact that “when we emerge from this current downturn, the world will be different. There is no going back to normal”.

IDC analyst Tim Dillon says enterprises should apply the “fitness for purpose” perspective when deploying cloud computing.
“You will hear a lot of organisations touting it as a panacea to all the problems the organisation faces. This is not true,” he told those attending a recent Auckland briefing on cloud computing organised by AT & T.

The next four years will be a once in a lifetime opportunity for success or failure, says John Gantz, IDC vice president, in his keynote speech at the start of this year's CIO Summit in Auckland.

Julia Raue says ICT is recognised across the entire Air New Zealand as critical to the business, and this plays a crucial role in their successful projects in the online space and customer self service that are earning accolades across the globe.
“IT-enabled business transformation has ensured Air New Zealand remains competitive, that is something we are incredibly proud of ” says Raue, who received the award at this year’s CIO Summit organised by CIO, IDC and BrightStar.

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).