West Australian-based Edith Cowan University (ECU) has not been shy in conducting ICT projects in recent years including the significant task of virtualizing its storage in 2007 and the rollout of the Live@edu hosted email platform to 36,000 students in 2009, as well as being part of the Australian academic supercomputing consortium iVEC. The university’s manager of IT infrastructure, Angus Griffin, has been instrumental throughout the projects and sat down with Computerworld Australia to discuss some of the major issues facing IT managers today and what’s next for ECU.

What does an average work day involve?

The average work day involves ensuring the health of the infrastructure and the team looking after it, along with making sure that we’re looking forward into the future with everything we do. We work very closely with our key strategic suppliers on a day-to-day basis but also with the rest of the sector – the university sector is a very collegiate environment and we try to work together with other research and education institutions as much as possible.

What are the major challenges you face in the role of IT manager?

University IT departments have an un-ending balancing act to perform between all those demands on IT to provide a robust service, to support the strategy of the organisation and to do both within our financial constraints. Putting in place and then operating an infrastructure which is robust and flexible enough to meet the needs of the organisation not only now but into the future presents a constant challenge.

What are some of the recent projects your IT department have been working on?

We’re working on finishing our new telephony system rollout and removing some of the last single-points of failure in our network core and electrical systems. Our identity and access management project will come to fruition later this year with the rollout of some of the core functionality happening in the fourth quarter.

What’s next on the IT agenda for ECU?

Setting up our infrastructure facilities to cater for the next ten years of requirements will be a huge undertaking for us and will probably take a few years to get right. This could involve work on existing facilities, building new facilities to replace our existing ones, or outsourcing – or some combination of those.

We’re also going to have to look at our video conferencing infrastructure as we’re running several disparate systems presently which are not ideal.

In the more immediate future, we are planning to do some work to improve the resiliency of our database infrastructures, both in the Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle spaces. We run a consolidated infrastructure for SQL Server, but will be continuing our per-system approach for Oracle-based applications.

What are the three biggest issues facing IT managers today?

In the University sector in particular, but I think across all industries generally, BYO computing and the ever-expanding range operating systems and devices to support is a key issue for IT groups today. As we’ve seen in a number of high profile cases recently (WA Parliament comes to mind), users are starting to dictate the devices which will be supported to IT teams rather than the other way around.

Perhaps providing a part-solution to this is, and I intensely dislike the term, Cloud computing. By this I mean two things: firstly outsourcing in one form or another along with standardisation, virtualization and consolidation, allowing IT teams to do more with less; and secondly the move of more and more applications to using the Web as a platform.

Often-forgotten, IT Security is becoming increasingly important. The trouble with this is that it spans across so many facets of the business so developing maturity takes a long time and a consistent investment in resourcing and strategy. When I say IT Security, I include the triumvirate of confidentiality, integrity and availability.

What’s your favourite gadget?

My Kindle – to be able to take a library with you makes travelling so much easier.

Source:http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/407144/q_edith_cowan_university_manager_it_infrastructure_angus_griffin/

With IT budgets under scrutiny at companies of all sizes, you might think IT management would look to dump low-level, time-intensive tasks to focus on more profitable, strategic tasks. But a new survey by Pegasus Research Group to gain insight about the allocation of time and ranking of importance regarding a variety of maintenance, deployment and strategic IT tasks performed by IT departments has uncovered some surprising results. The survey, sponsored by Logicalis, a leading provider of high-performance technology solutions, discovered that maintenance tasks, ranked as lower in importance, are taking up more than twice the time of strategic tasks that were ranked higher in importance.

The survey, conducted last quarter, polled respondents across multiple revenue sizes, regions and industries, with titles ranging from IT director to C-level executives.

The top ranked IT tasks reflect a concern for enterprise infrastructure and the need to better align technology initiatives with business results. Among the top ranked IT tasks were:
- Backup
- Security
- Compliance
- IT/Business Alignment

The bottom ranked IT tasks reflect items that may be best outsourced to reduce costs and enable IT staffs to focus on more strategic items. Among the lowest ranked IT Tasks were:
- Patch Management
- Firmware Updates
- Performance Management
- Help Desk
- Resource Scheduling
- Vendor Management
- Installation
- Test/Burn In
- Resource Planning
- Policy Procedure Updates
- File Restore
- Attend Training

Technologists at Logicalis recommend that IT managers consider alternative IT maintenance options, such as managed services, which provides the ability to control costs and reduce capital expenditures. A copy of the survey is available for complimentary download at: http://www.us.logicalis.com/docs/Pegasus-Research-Report-IT-Task-Management.pdf.

“Not only does managed services lower IT spending, it gets the maintenance tasks done at a new level of quality based on ITIL v3 standards.” said Wayne Kiphart, Logicalis’ vice president of managed services. “We encourage IT management to consider the impact that would have on strategic business tasks than can help their business.”

Source:http://trak.in/india/new-survey-shows-it-managers-focus-bulk-of-their-time-on-the-wrong-tasks/international-62463/

When we compiled our list last year, the situation looked far from ideal. This year, it’s positively dire.

But first, a recap. The Middle East IT scene has been hurtling along for the past five years as if tied to the front of a runaway locomotive. Budgets swelled out of proportion, projects rushed through inception, planning and implementation and IT teams expanded as if the demand would never end.

It was all quite necessary, of course. Everyone has been witness to the phenomenal growth of the Middle East over the past decade, particularly in oil-rich UAE. CEOs demanded that their technology divisions be able to deliver immense amounts of infrastructure to a population that was young, diverse, educated and hungry for more information and greater connectivity.

As we all know however, the party came to an end last year. A new imperative took over – cost. IT managers suddenly came under strict instructions to limit funding to only the most essential projects, while all extraneous activities were either curtailed or ‘delayed’ indefinitely – shorthand for outright cancellation in our book.

That was indeed the story for much of the early part of the year. The challenge had transitioned from being able to supply services quickly and efficiently to as cheaply as possible and with the minimum number of in-house staff. New initiatives (to this region, at least) such as cloud computing, virtualisation and outsourcing took on sudden importance as CEOs looked at every means of reducing their overheads and directed CIOs to find ways of making them work. When it didn’t, staff cuts ensued, essential services suffered and eventually customers – the real end-users – began to notice a tangible drop in the quality of their IT.

That was the story – and for many enterprises, it still is the case. But our top IT managers for 2009 is not intended to be a list of the ten people who managed to cut the most costs while still remaining viable. In fact, while they have found ways of becoming efficient with their IT spend, there is not a single one among them who will admit to reducing staff at all.

Instead, over the next few pages, you will find a set of extraordinary individuals. In the middle of a global financial meltdown, these ten CIOs and IT managers have defied conventional wisdom by maintaining considerable investment in technology. They have pursued innovation, creating new means of working where possible and finding better ways of adapting old technology when not. Some have worked hard to bring the technology community closer together; others have taken age-old institutions and given them new life.

Above all, they illustrate how it is impossible – and ultimately futile – it is to try and predict the future based on past trends. Take the range of verticals they represent. For instance, the retail sector was especially hard hit this year, yet three of our winners hail from it. Banking and finance, healthcare and hospitality are equally represented, while manufacturing shows real muscle with two entries.

With so many contenders from this region, the choice of just ten individuals was hard to make. But we are confident that our selections represent the finest talent the Middle East has to offer.

Source:http://www.arabianbusiness.com/577945-it-managers-of-the-year