Should your business start using the Cloud? What does that even mean, anyway?

Cloud Computing has dramatically changed the way many businesses operate and has opened up exciting new opportunities. There are now 1000’s of powerful yet easy to use “cloud based” (or Software as a Service – SaaS) web applications that can be used to help companies reduce costs and succeed in a fast changing business environment.

Many of these web applications now have APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) which allow web products to be integrated to create powerful web / mobile web solutions quickly and cost effectively.

In this down to earth presentation aimed at less technical business people (business owners, marketing managers and project managers) but suitable for techies too, 3months.com’s Mark Pascall uses practical examples to outline the basics of cloud computing and some of the implications of this major paradigm shift.

Stuart Wakefield, Director of the Office of the Government CIO, shares his view of the potential opportunity presented by Cloud Computing. He outlines how it can enable the public sector to transform its business processes, lower its operating costs, and allow greater mobility for the public sector workforce.

The Catalyst Open Source Academy is an initiative designed to provide training and work experience for young New Zealand technologists.

The pilot programme was held for two weeks in January 2011 and has since been repeated in 2012 and beyond. In 2011 it gave 17 Secondary School students a taste of real open source development through a combination of classroom sessions and hands-on project work.

The aim was to get the students to the point where they could usefully contribute to a real (open source) project.

By organising and funding the Academy, Catalyst hoped to show young technologists how to participate in open source communities and to fully explore their passion for IT through freely available open source tools.

In this thought-provoking presentation Catalyst’s Ian Beardslee will outline how they put the initiative together, what worked and what didn’t, and lessons learnt from the project.

Most Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse systems are based on structured data. But structured data is commonly estimated to be only around 15% of all the data in any organisation.

So what about the rest? How real is your information if it is based on just 15% of the available data?

This presentation is based on the many years of practical experience that Trish O’Kane and Clare Somerville bring from their respective worlds of structured and unstructured data management and information delivery.

They present some of the pain points, challenges and opportunities that span both structured and unstructured data, including information strategies, search, mashups, master data, metadata, governance and compliance.

Throughout Europe in the 18th Century the great Age of Enlightenment was born, a movement promoting the black arts of education, reason and logic in decision-making.

In this entertaining and informative presentation popular ICT commentator and online strategist the late Paul Reynolds shines light on the new Internet-driven “Age of Enlightenment” happening right now, and how individuals and organisations can cash in on the phenomena by building upon the growing wealth of publicly-available open data covering everything from map and geospatial information, through to the human genome itself.

In a truly inspired presentation designed to provoke discussion and debate Paul Reynolds’s asks: Is the ICT profession ready for the 18th century?

Technical implementations, especially those that directly affect end-users and the way they do their jobs, are notoriously difficult to do well.

During the 2009/10 financial year, Palmerston North City Council rolled out the E-docs (Hummingbird) Document Management System to 450 users across the business. Councils are complex businesses with system users based not only in the office but also remote locations such as libraries, the depot, the arena, the lab and the crematorium.

The EDRMS promised to change the way everybody worked with documents and emails. Early on it was realised that the success of the roll-out depended upon good change management, education, communication and training. This was a people project. This recording is about the people approach that made the project such a success.

Liz Stockley was the Information Manager at Palmerston North City Council and Shiree Hart was the Knowledge consultant from Allfields. Both were part of the team responsible for this successful rollout and share their knowledge and experience.

The threats we face are ever changing, but how are they different from 1 year, 2 years, 3 years ago? What can we expect in the future?

As one of the handlers at the Internet Storm Centre, Mark Hofman has a unique view of the internet and the different threats present.

The Internet Storm Centre sees what was, is and will be and how they evolve. In the presentation Mark goes through a number of the things that the Centre has seen and how they evolve.

The manner in which business needs have been documented and implemented has changed dramatically over the 50 or so years that computers have been around. This presentation traces the history of methodology from the early days through to the present.

Changes in approaches to systems development have been largely dictated by the hardware and software capabilities of the time coupled with continuing refinements in how the real world is perceived and can be modeled and simulated. Starting in the 60’s when The Beatles were the rage, it traces methodology from a simple “get it written” approach to “Enterprise Architecture” as seen through the eyes of someone who has “been there, done that”.

The methodology path evolves through the structured approaches of the 70’s and on to the “ultimate” of Information Engineering. From there it meanders through object orientation and the birth of UML in the 90’s. It ends with a picture of methodology today which mixes the best of the past with the realities of now and the impact of Zachman, TOGAF and Enterprise Architecture.

In this podcast, John Fisher looks at these significant developments in a lighthearted, though sometimes serious way, based on his own experiences. The objective of this talk is to both inform and entertain.

The Gartner 2009 conference on Business Intelligence found a discontinuity between what businesses want from Business Intelligence (BI) and what IT is delivering.

The demand is for Strategic BI, but IT departments are not delivering a BI Strategy – they focus on point solutions. IT compare the cost of centralising BI into a Data Warehouse against the ease of implementing Data Marts, whereas the Business sees the significant benefits of a Data Warehouse and the cost of fragmented Data Marts.

In this session Roy Elgar covers:

• Key success factors in delivering Strategic BI – governance, roadmaps, logical and physical models and data architecture


• Measuring Success in Data Warehousing – 5 stages of DW growth and exploitation, examples from around AsiaPacific and Japan


• Technology trends – why ELT (Extract, Load and Transform) is replacing ETL (Extract, Transform and Load), in-DW applications and in-DW data mining

By now we were all supposed to have flying cars, holidays on the moon and household robots. What we’ve ended up with is spam, speed cameras and The Pirate Bay.

While society and business evolve relatively slowly, technology – particularly IT – moves faster than many of us feel comfortable with.

In this recording, Vik Olliver takes stock of the last year’s advances in IT, reveals some of the great hidden technologies, polishes his crystal ball, and looks at why we’re still struggling in an IT dystopia.