Beverley Head began writing about the business of technology in London in 1983. After moving to Australia in 1987 she became the IT editor of the Australian Financial Review, taking the once weekly section daily, before becoming the newspaper’s features editor. Now a freelance writer she continues to focus on business and technology, and is a senior enterprise writer for iTWire based in Sydney. She has written for a wide range of publications including The Age, BRW, Boss, Campus Review, Education Review, Information Age, iTWire, The Sheet and The Sydney Morning Herald. In 2004 she was awarded the Kester Cranswick lifetime achievement award for her work as an IT journalist.
Beverley, who was born in the North of England , holds a Bachelor of Arts in Metallurgy and the Science of Materials from Oxford University and a deep affection for things which are shaken not stirred..
There’s never a good time for bank networks to crash – but Friday, when people are shopping or cashing up for the weekend is about the worst. National Australia Bank was today at full tilt to fix its latest computer headache which saw customers unable to use the ATM or Eftpos network for much of the day.
The $33 million Personal Property Security Register built by Fujitsu for the Attorney General’s department has endured a fraught first fortnight. By some estimates it may take another three months for the already delayed system to be operating smoothly.
By the end of last year Australia had around 700 too many ICT managers, and 2,700 too few ICT professionals. It’s the classic case of too many chiefs and not enough Indians.
IT services giant CSC has announced that Mike Lawrie will take up the reins as president and CEO before the end of March this year. It’s a case of CEO revolving doors as Mr Lawrie’s previous employer is being taken over by another company which wasn’t planning to make him CEO.
Australia’s peak ICT industry body is bringing Vivek Kundra, the former White House CIO and author of the Obama government’s Cloud First policy to inject some “fact” into the debate surround cloud uptake. Today of course Mr Kundra is an executive vice president with Salesforce.com – a company with a vested interest in talking up the cloud.
At a time when banks are shedding IT roles by the dozen, it seems counter-intuitive that 83 per cent of the nation’s chief information officers should report they are confident about the future of their business to the extent that 45 per cent expect to hire IT staff in the first six months of the year. The question remains – is this a dead cat bounce?
St George Bank’s website reappeared on Monday evening after prolonged "technical issues” – although it remained possible while the web site was off air to log on and use the online banking and business banking services suggesting that the core banking systems (the Hogan platform supplied by CSC) weren’t affected.
Traditional media companies the world over are grappling with what they should provide free online, and how and if they should charge for content. In Australia the two main print juggernauts News Ltd and Fairfax have switched strategies – with Fairfax now giving away free the content it used to charge for, and News locking up once free content behind a paywall. A new global report released today by KPMG suggests it’s Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd that may have it wrong.
There’s a big hole in Australian IT spending with 15 per cent of businesses admitting that they don’t spend a red cent on disaster recovery or business continuity services. It’s even worse internationally where 22 per cent of companies spend zilch on the issue.
Australian would-be entrepreneurs will get a crash course in how to ditch and repitch their business plans during a sell-out workshop being hosted by NICTA tomorrow.
