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.

Some ITIL projects are misbegotten: they should never have been approved.

Rob England provides some practical guidelines to help decide whether a project should go ahead at all, and if they do then how to keep them on track. Instead of 3 out of 10 projects being successful, Rob believes the a ratio of 5 out of 7 is achievable.

Rob is a “portfolio entrepreneur”, working on multiple activities via his company, Two Hills. These include IT commentator, speaker and consultant (ITSM, culture change…), blogger, speaking coach, sales coach, trainer, published author, small business researcher, and nascent internet businessman.

Rob outlines an approach to approving, governing and administering ITIL projects to ensure maximum value on investment.

Warwick Sullivan discusses the current shortcomings in the area of suitable IT Governance, why getting this right is so important to the success of IT projects (and, in fact, organisations), and the recipe for improving IT governance and hence reducing the likelihood of IT project failure.

Warwick will outline the need to have a greater emphasis on people and communication, rather than the process-based approach taken by some organisations.

Warwick is the founder of Sandcastle Consulting specialising in the governance of business projects with IT components, strategic development, and service management. He is a certified ITIL Expert, MSP practitioner, PRINCE2 practitioner, governance of enterprise IT, qualified in CobIT, ValIT, and ISO9000 auditing.

NZCS is in the process of researching and planning, then implementing, an internationally-aligned and recognised ICT Competency Framework and Professional Certification process in New Zealand to ensure kiwi ICT professionals gain the professional support and recognition they need, both here and around the world.

In this overview, NZCS President Don Robertson will outline the background information gathered during his recent trip to Europe where he visited the BCS (British Computer Society), met with the SFIA Foundation (Skills Framework for the Information Age) and attended the ICT Professionalism and Competencies stream at the IFIP World Computer Conference (WCC2008).

Don provides an overview of the international research in this area, concentrating on the competency frameworks and professional programmes of our kindred organisations in other countries and how this relates to the work currently being completed in New Zealand.

The slides from this presentation are available from here.

Please comment on the thread in the NZCS forums

Historically, many IS Security practitioners would have argued that Microsoft did not take security as seriously as they would like.

However on the 15th of January 2002 Bill Gates sent his “We can and must do better” memo on trustworthy computing to all Microsoft staff. In the memo Bill told his staff that security was now their top priority. ”...when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security.”

Peter O’Dowd is a Windows Server MVP for Exchange Server. He is a well known and respected figure worldwide and often trains Microsoft consultants and trainers. Over the past two years he has spent a lot of his time writing content for Microsoft. He particularly specialises in developing labs and virtual environments.

In this presentation Peter outlines how far Microsoft has come along the journey laid out in that historical memo.

In real life if you want to talk to your bank you look up their phone number in the whitepages and call them knowing it is your bank. Why do you trust the phone number? Because it came from a trusted source – the whitepages. If you want to visit your bank’s website, your browser looks up their IP address in the DNS. Why do you trust the IP address? You can’t. The IP address has normally come across an unauthenticated link using an assortment of third party servers and hopefully the IP address actually came from your bank’s DNS server.

To work around this we use SSL certificates with HTTPS to forge encrypted connections to webservers and hopefully determine some form of trust. But since a lot of sites have expired certs or snake oil certs or other brokenness, this obviously doesn’t work. Besides, how many end users actually check those certificates?

In this presentation Andrew Ruthven from Catalyst IT will discuss aspects of making the DNS secure and trustworthy, such as DNSSEC, NSEC, NSEC3, TSIG and a bunch of other obscure names, and also highlight some of the outstanding issues.

In this topical presentation Jonathan Stuckey, Solutions Specialist in Business Productivity and Office tools for Microsoft New Zealand, outlines how Unified Communications give people the power to work better together, connect more easily to information, and work wherever and whenever they want.

He also outlines how software-powered unified communications technologies streamline communications between people and organizations, regardless of medium, platform, device, or location.

XtraMSN was, until recently, New Zealand’s most trafficked website with millions of visitors per month. In recent years they have run several user testing studies to understand how to make their site more intuitive and easy to use.

In this presentation Trent Mankelow, co-founder and director of Optimal Usability, outlines how by observing representative users interacting with proposed design changes they were able to achieve key business goals, influence visitor behaviour and improve the user experience.