Conclusion: The IT skills shortage is likely to worsen. In addition to technical skills, technology leaders and workers overwhelmingly recognise the value of creativity in the workplace, yet they lament their inability to effectively cultivate creativity. Creativity can unlock innovation in the enterprise, generate high levels of employee satisfaction, and make a significant

Conclusion: In an environment where the quality of front line services is critical for customer loyalty, the call centre’s (or contact centre or help desk) performance is pivotal. A salient way to measure the call centre’s performance is to calculate its First Call issue Resolution rate (FCR), i. e. the rate at which received calls are resolved the first time while the

Conclusion: The blending of different corporate cultures can be a huge risk factor that can significantly impact the success or failure of an acquisition. Maintaining multiple corporate cultures is extremely difficult to do, and the chances of failure are high. Cultures usually have upsides and downsides. When trying to keep cultures separate, employees tend to only see the

Conclusion: Organisations develop unique cultures. It may be a deliberate and conscious effort of the executive team to define and put in place a culture which will influence the way the organisation works, its priorities and its attitudes. Or it may just be something that has evolved over time as an organisation has grown, added more employees, expanded its business, or

Conclusion: Given the frequency of acquisitions within the information technology (IT) sector, it is prudent that clients of the organisations involved spend time to consider the possible outcomes or consequences of the acquisition, and in particular if the outcomes are likely to be good or bad news for them.

Acquisitions are likely to always involve changes in staff.

Conclusion: The 2018 CIO survey¹ revealed that the CIO’s influence is stalling, with fewer CIOs on executive boards. However, improving business processing is still the #1 operational priority. To address this priority, CIOs and IT managers should use everyday tools such as calendars to better collaborate with their staff by

Conclusion: Acquisitions are a frequent occurrence amongst information and communication technology (ICT) vendors and solution providers. The outcomes of an acquisition or merger will impact clients as well as the employees of the organisations.

Clients and employees should invest in thinking about the announced acquisitions, what the stated goals are for the

Conclusion: There are many strategies to consider as well as challenges to be aware of when migrating from a traditional waterfall development methodology to an agile methodology. Plan and prepare carefully and be patient during this transition and anticipated benefits will be realised.

Conclusion: The CIO’s role has changed considerably over the past couple of decades, from “keeping the lights on” and working on cost-saving initiatives (automation) to expanding into embracing new technologies and enablers to transform the organisation. The importance of this has created additional roles like the Chief Digital Officer (CDO) to lead this critical

Conclusion: The role of being a supportive follower is overlooked as compared against the literature of being a leader. Everyone is a follower, yet by a factor of over 1,000 to 1¹, information is overwhelmingly written about how to be a better leader rather than about being a follower. As a leader, there are many benefits in

Conclusion: Being able to deal with workplace conflict quickly and effectively reaps many rewards. There are different strategies that can be used to deal with the differing types of conflict in the workplace. Being mindful that personality classifications are fluid states of being, i. e. there is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert...

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Conclusion:CEOs need their CIOs to be out on the cutting edge to decide which technology to incorporate so that the organisation can adapt and transform in a rapidly changing landscape. As the digital leader, the CIO needs to emphasise the culture shift, be an influencer and guide the change across the IT team and broader enterprise. Organisations that elect CIOs as their

Conclusion:Growth in ICT remains strong in the foreseeable future in a very competitive market. Successful CIOs and ICT leaders responsible for staffing and sourcing need to adopt multiple strategies to successfully recruit, retain and plan for the resource challenges of tomorrow.

Conclusion:One of the least understood contributors in implementing IT projects successfully is the leadership provided by competent TTLs (Technical Team Leads). Their ability to steer projects in the right direction, maximise the contribution of team members and cement the relationship with sponsors, is pivotal.

IT professionals, with potential to act as TTLs, must

Conclusion:One of the objectives of an IT workforce plan is to maximise the use of the skilled IT professionals and project managers and minimise their idle time. Managing the IT workforce plan is a complex task in most organisations as skill levels required may vary by project and by operational support roles.

To be successful, the manager of the plan must maintain

Conclusion:IT professionals who operate in a structured and predictable environment could find the role change to that of an IT manager more challenging than they had anticipated, as it typically requires a mind-set change from completing one or two tasks to managing people. To avoid disappointment, senior management must help new IT managers make the transition and cope

Conclusion:Whilst the forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European regulation, some Australian organisations are likely to be impacted and will need to comply. One of the requirements of the regulation is to appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO), whose job role has very specific duties and legal responsibilities which are defined as part of the

Conclusion:Effective ICT project managers are essential to the successful running of any ICT-led change initiative. They provide a necessary level of trust and confidence to the CIO and are a key resource for any effective CIO running a large mix of ongoing and change initiatives.

Conclusion: It is not enough to just work hard and deliver results, although these are essential qualities to get noticed. To obtain that elusive CIO job and then keep it requires more ongoing effort and vigilance negotiating, monitoring and engaging at executive levels.

Conclusion: Leaders play an integral role in setting the team or office culture which, if positive, improves the effectiveness and performance of that team. Be patient as it takes time to turn around a suffering team, even if they are recruited to transform and instil positive cultural change.

Conclusion: Successful ICT life cycle service delivery from strategy development to system decommissioning relies on the person assigned the role picking up the work in progress and successfully completing the task before handing it to the next agreed role. It is analogous to the relay runner at an athletics carnival taking the baton from the previous runner and, on

Conclusion: IT management teams that spend little time planning to grow and retain talented people will find it hard and expensive to keep pace with technology advances and business model changes. Conversely, IT management that makes every effort to retain staff are likely to be employers that attract the best people. They will do this by helping them enhance their skills and

Conclusion: Organisations that fail to develop the skills of their BAs, or give them intellectually challenging roles, are in danger of losing them and their corporate memory. BAs used wisely are often the glue holding complex projects together.

Use them to elicit and simplify business

Conclusion: As cyber security gains awareness among business leaders, many organisations are undertaking new cyber risk management initiatives. However, these initiatives can be misdirected if business leaders are not clear on why they are

Conclusion: The role of a cyber security executive is challenging at the best of times, as they need to continually strike a balance between informing and influencing, without continually alarming. But the context surrounding why an organisation creates a cyber security executive role is critical to the success of cyber risk management. Executive level commitment

Conclusion: Non-IT executives are often reported as being concerned about the prospect of a cyber incident, but as security is not their area of expertise, responsibility for mitigation and preparation is often devolved to IT. This is a mistake, because as much as lack of any security could be devastating, applying the wrong controls to an organisation can be

Conclusion: Security leaders know that it is not enough for the security group to do its job; they must be seen to be doing their job. This need for communication between security and the business is resulting in organisations creating outreach roles. Many organisations have yet to realise that this communications gap directly impacts their risk

Conclusion: Big data and analytics projects can learn important lessons from the domain of information security analytics platforms. Two critical factors to consider when planning deployment of an analytics platform are: the need for a clear business objective and; the depth and duration of organisational commitment required. Without a clear understanding of the

Conclusion: failure to maintain a competent ERP support group¹ can have an adverse impact on an organisation’s business operations. When the group lacks the resources to keep the software current or to resolve data errors in rejected transactions, clients become disillusioned with the ERP and either work around its requirements

Conclusion: To provide easy to use online client services, organisations must create cross functional teams with people who can work together to implement solutions which can be tightly integrated with back office systems, and work first time. Failure to assign the right people first time will, until it is fixed, cause tension and stifle innovation.

Conclusion:Virtual teams continue to be an accepted organisation mode as a means of grouping specialist and project resources together to achieve high quality outcomes. Recent research¹ identifies that more than 40% or Fortune 500 companies currently utilise virtual teaming. Smaller organisations have found that technology

Conclusion: Whilst surveys highlight a surplus of ICT professionals and managers, job recruiters are not convinced. They claim the many vacancies on their books for skilled ICT professionals indicate there is a shortfall. Ironically both claims are true and together demand a different management response.