IT puts its house in order, for business' sake

27.03.2006
As IT executives seek to transform their operations into true, corporate assets that can help grow the business at their companies, many are finding that first they must impose much tighter controls over their often vast and unwieldy portfolios of technology projects.

Numerous Australian CIOs said they are moving quickly to ensure that their IT staff are doing work that meets business priorities and can generate the highest possible return on investment. For example, Tasmanian Department of Health and Human Services CIO, Garry Hulme, said there are so many projects currently under way the agency couldn't get it all done if they simply sequenced one after the other.

"We have some 10,000 employees at more than 350 sites, 40 to 50 different areas of service including mental health, public housing and hospitals," Hulme said. "This year we will be focusing on infrastructure development, improving data communication and information storage to ensure there are enough workstations and access points. Being so diverse we are attempting to get value out of information we hold across our different services."

The department is also looking at ways to protect information and establish individual consent modules which creates considerable overhead. It also involves a lot of integration work to ensure standards are in place to share and move information.

"The biggest challenge in health related areas is [balancing] the demands for new equipment by health professionals against tight budgetary demands," he said.

For Perth-based Murdoch University IT services director Chris Foley, the biggest challenge today is implementing a configuration management system for the organization's 3,100 PCs to remotely manage inventory and configure and deploy software from one central point. "This is something we have manually managed in the past and will take about six months to implement," Foley said.