Stories by Sue Bushell

Linux: The Power and the Passion PART ONE

Linux: you can't beat the price and with performance proven in mid-scale deployments, this open source OS is stealthily finding its way into enterprise IT. Sue Bushell reports

Cover Story: E-commerce projects: Management at the speed of light

Balance the skills of inspiring a diverse group of professionals to get the best out of an equally diverse range of technologies, with the vision of the sales and marketing gurus, and the constraints bean counters put on budgets, then funnel all this into delivering the best outcomes for the customer's wishlist - and getting it right at Internet speed is the key to managing projects in today's e-business world. Sue Bushell reports

Organisations have increasingly paid tribute to the relationship between IT success and strong project management over recent years but it's clear e-business projects are the proof of the pudding.

E-commerce projects: Management at the speed of light

Organisations have increasingly paid tribute to the relationship between IT success and strong project management over recent years but it's clear e-business projects are the proof of the pudding.

Intelligent approach to BI

Just 12 months ago a severe paucity of information was making it increasingly hard for superannuation fund administrator QSuper to compete in an industry where complexity had soared over the previous decade.
Now the organisation is facing almost the opposite problem. According to director of trustee services Barry Cook, the challenge these days is to ensure managers aren't overwhelmed by the sheer weight of business intelligence (BI) suddenly available to them.
Rodney Hamilton, operations director for market researcher GfK Australia, is confronting a related but not entirely similar problem now that the organisation uses a Cognos-powered Web-based delivery mechanism to deliver reports to clients. Hamilton says the tool occasionally proves so powerful, the challenge for the Australian arm is to get users to take full advantage of the software that's been given them. There's just too much functionality for most of them to cope with.

Mentor Capital

E-enabling an organisation can cause bad blood. If your company is better at killing off good ideas than bringing them to fruition, an e-business incubator might be just what you need to give your team a much-needed transfusion

Access Denied

When it comes to doing business on the Web the first rule is: please everyone, all the time. Shut the disabled out of your Web site and you not only risk legal action - you'll be missing out on one of the largest blocks of buying power the Internet has to offer

Links that hold: making sense of application integration

Want to integrate all the apps running the company's vital operations? Well, the secret it appears is not in new technology or languages but in getting back to business.

M-commerce key to ubiquitous Internet

Even before its inception father of the Internet Tim Berners-Lee envisaged the Web as the place where the world's population could access any amount of information from anywhere and at anytime.
Many businesses prefer to view it as a giant marketplace where they can tout for customers anywhere, any time. Sue Bushell reports

IT spend figures fuel new attack on Luddite' government

New research highlighting a further slump in private sector spending on industry innovation has re-ignited the controversy over the Howard government's 1996 slashing of the tax concession on R&D funding.

E-cruiting no panacea - yet (Computerworld Special Report)

There seems little doubt the Web is the eventual Promised Land of IT recruiting, but for now employers, recruitment companies and candidates alike remain unimpressed with Internet-based online recruiting services. Sue Bushell reports
Everyone agrees that onlinerecruitment has a great many advantages over offline methods like newspaper ads in attracting potential candidates.

Anatomy of e-procurement success

E-marketplaces promise huge efficiency gains and lower costs by enabling electronic buying and selling. They give customers a way to instantly compare price and availability across multiple manufacturers and products. Sue Bushell talks to those in the forefront. The impact of e-procurement on the entire marketplace is, in time, set to be profound, with analysts predicting e-marketplaces will kill off the traditional purchasing department by 2002.