Enhancing Efficiency through IT Flexibility
Peter Bourke, a speaker at the marcus evans Australian CIO Summit 2010, discusses long-term strategies for CIOs in Australia.
Chief Information Officers (CIOs) can add value to the enterprise by ensuring the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure is flexible enough for hooking and unhooking applications as necessary, says Peter Bourke, IT Director at Westfield. A speaker at the marcus evans Australian CIO Summit 2010 taking place in Queensland, 2 – 4 August 2010, Bourke shares his thoughts on adding value, improving IT productivity and efficiency, and cloud computing.
What long-term goals would you recommend to CIOs in Australia?
Peter Bourke: CIOs should follow a middle-way strategy whereby applications and data repositories can be easily hooked and unhooked to various new or alternative applications or technologies. It is important not to be contained by the IT architecture but to allow for easily transferring to new applications or data repositories, allowing applications that are required to be taken up into the cloud.
What are some of the technological solutions that CIOs can take advantage of? What does cloud computing offer?
Peter Bourke: The opportunities for CIOs lie in delivering new and value added technologies; moving the infrastructure and the networks from the back office and making use of more flexible and scalable application technologies to add real value to the enterprise.
Looking at flexibility, CIOs may want to go to an externally hosted application or to a cloud which is either managed within the organisation or by a cloud provider; this could be a hosted CRM, payment website or schedule that could be linked to the organisation’s own internal ERP systems.
The cloud computing opportunities are initially around the infrastructure environment. However, there are some challenges around how software vendors are looking at licensing and charging for their applications; for those going from an in-house solution to one that is hosted in a cloud, the pricing model and the entry and exit strategies that may apply are unclear.
Which initiatives do you consider most successful at improving IT productivity and efficiency?
Peter Bourke: I think the biggest benefits have come from self-help and self-service applications around meeting the needs of staff and personnel and also providing flexibility in the business intelligence reporting arena where senior management and executives can build their own reporting formats quickly and easily to deliver the information that they need in their day-to-day activities.
Contact: Sarin Kouyoumdjian-Gurunlian, Press Manager, marcus evans, Summits Division
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About the Australian CIO Summit 2010
This unique forum will take place at the RACV Royal Pines Resort, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 2 – 4 August 2010. Offering much more than any conference, seminar or trade show, this exclusive meeting will bring together esteemed industry thought leaders and solution providers to a highly focused and interactive networking event. The summit includes presentations on employing Business Intelligence, mastering risk management and virtualisation.
For more information please send an email to info@marcusevanscy.com or visit the event website at http://www.australianciosummit.com/PeterBourkeInterview
Please note that the summit is a closed business event and the number of participants strictly limited.
About marcus evans Summits
marcus evans Summits are high level business forums for the world’s leading decision-makers to meet, learn and discuss strategies and solutions. Held at exclusive locations around the world, these events provide attendees with a unique opportunity to individually tailor their schedules of keynote presentations, think tanks, seminars and one-to-one business meetings. For more information, please visit http://www.marcusevans.com
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