NZCS Podcasts

Evolution of Development Methodologies

Wellington Branch — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +1300

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.

File Download (46:49 min / 16 MB)

Data Warehousing to Maximise Business Intelligence

Wellington Branch — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +1300

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

This interactive presentation explains how a good DW strategy and implementation delivers value to both Business and IT.

File Download (54:54 min / 19 MB)

Who moved the future?

Wellington Branch — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +1200

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.

File Download (38:24 min / 13 MB)

Rob England: Owning ITIL

Wellington Branch — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +1200

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.

File Download (40:52 min / 14 MB)

Simple steps to improving IT Governance

Wellington Branch — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +1200

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.

File Download (40:18 min / 14 MB)

International ICT Professionalism and Competencies

Wellington Branch — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

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

File Download (57:00 min / 20 MB)

Security Features within Exchange 2007

Wellington Branch — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +1200

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.

File Download (62:11 min / 21 MB)

Keeping the DNS Secure and Trustworthy

ISSIG Wellington — Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 +1200

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.

File Download (56:11 min / 19 MB)

The Future of Business Communications

Wellington Branch — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 +1200

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.

File Download (49:03 min / 17 MB)

Usability at XtraMSN - A Case Study

Wellington Branch — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

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.

File Download (55:50 min / 19 MB)

ITIL Version 3, A sceptics view

Wellington Branch — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Never mind the hype: what does ITIL really mean to business? And what of the newly released Version 3 – how does that change the game?

Rob England is known by his pseudonym, the IT Skeptic. He is relatively well known in the international ITIL community for his critical analysis of ITIL content, governance and industry, communicating through his blog at www.itskeptic.org. He is also the editor of the itSMFnz newsletter.

The ITIL framework has been embraced rapidly and enthusiastically throughout the world and the authors of ITIL claim that alignment with the business becomes a reality with the implementation of Version 3.

This presentation is a critique of this claim.

File Download (57:53 min / 20 MB)

Joe Stewart - Fighting Spam

Wellington Branch — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +1200

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 took effect in New Zealand on 5 September 2007. The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) established an Anti-Spam Unit to investigate complaints about spam from the public and act against New Zealand ‘spammers’.

Joe Stewart heads the team of five, comprising two investigators, an IT technician and a data analyst. He says they are looking forward to doing their bit against spam ‘the scourge of the e-commerce world’.

This presentation focuses on the requirements of the new Act and how you can ensure your organisation meets them.

If you would like to know more about the new legislation check out www.antispam.govt.nz

File Download (65:51 min / 23 MB)

User-centric Information Sharing: A key enabler to transform government

Wellington Branch — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

One of the biggest challenges facing government in its quest for transformation is sharing of information across structural silos. In particular, the sharing of personal information needs to have exceptionally high security and protection of privacy designed in. A conceptual framework to enable this has been created by the ICT Branch of the State Services Commission.

Vikram Kumar from the SSC will discuss the challenges the government faces in this regard, the conceptual framework, and how current components being built by the Authentication Programme are contributing towards this future vision.

File Download (69:43 min / 24 MB)

The Business of Open Source

Wellington Branch — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Open source is starting to become a major influence on the IT industry, affecting not only the way we do business, but also the open source community itself.

In the wider business sector, open source has enabled many new companies to spring from nowhere and begin to challenge some mature business models.

How does the economy of open source work? What’s in it for consumers and the producers of open source software? What can we expect to see in the medium term and how do you go about planning for it? How can New Zealand businesses in particular benefit?

This talk by Chris Daish provides a bird’s eye view of the open source ‘phenomenon’ with some real-world case studies and thought-provoking observations from one of New Zealand’s most successful open source companies – Catalyst IT.

File Download (59:50 min / 21 MB)

An Overview of Agile Methods

Wellington Branch — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Shane Hastie of Software Education provides an introduction and overview of Agile Software Development, looking at the underlying philosophy and motivation for this trend in software development.

The presentation touching on the core practices and techniques of a number of Agile Methods, including eXtreme Programming, SCRUM, Adaptive Software Development and Feature Driven Development.

File Download (58:59 min / 20 MB)

Outsourcing Experience and Current Theory/Trends

Wellington Branch — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +1300

Channa Jayasinha has been working in the IT Sector in a variety of IT Management roles over the past 22 years, including roles such as IT Manager at Te Papa during the Museum project phase, CIO at the Department of Conservation and currently is the CTO at Ministry of Economic Development.

He successfully managed the process from internal support to outsourcing the Information Technology Services for Department of Conservation. He has repeated this process for the Ministry of Economic Development and learnt through the process of internal and external consultation.

Today Channa will share these experiences and align them to current international thought leadership from the Gartner conference being held in Sydney in November.

File Download (53:04 min / 18 MB)

Information Architecture for the Ministry of Education

Wellington Branch — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +1300

John Fisher is the Data Architect for the Ministry of Education. For the Ministry to achieve its objectives and enable all learners to reach their full potential policies must be formulated and implemented in all its areas of influence from curriculum definition through to resource provision.

The Information Architecture must, therefore, cover the whole range of ICT capability from transaction processing and data collection to information dissemination and knowledge management.

John has been given chief responsibility for defining and guiding the Information Architecture for the MoE and will describe the architecture, initiatives and systems which are being put in place to achieve a successful outcome for the provision of knowledge management support to the NZ Education Sector.

File Download (51:25 min / 18 MB)

Beyond Earthquakes: New Geophysical Insights From Continuous Seismic Monitoring

Wellington Branch — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +1200

John Townend talks about exciting technological developments of the last decade in geophysics and natural hazard monitoring – not least the advent of the GeoNet monitoring network, www.geonet.org.nz – from the perspective of a geophysicist.

Key advances have been made using continuous global positioning system (GPS) data and seismographs sensitive to a wide range of frequencies, and slow earthquakes, seismic tremor, and correlated seismic noise are just three phenomena that were unknown of until a few years ago.

The talk covers the sorts of instruments used to record earth deformation, the methods used to collect that information in real-time, and what the data themselves indicate about how the earth works. No prior geophysics required!

File Download (56:40 min / 20 MB)

Delivering Value to Business Through IT

Wellington Branch — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +1200

One of the common problems faced internationally by IT Directors and IT Managers is that the senior management of the organisations in which they serve have a “lingering, gut-level concern or doubt about the business value derived from their IT investments.”

So what does that mean to local IT here in NZ?

Drawing from his extensive experience as a service management consultant and local businessman, Craig Pattison will lead a discussion on how you can deliver business value through IT, and possibly more importantly, how you can demonstrate this value to the senior management of your organisation.

File Download (49:43 min / 17 MB)

Web 2.0: The Brave New Web - A New Way of Thinking

Wellington Branch — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +1200

Most people are still wondering what Web 2.0 actually means or what it stands for, whereas some entrepreneurs or keen business managers are wondering how they can make money with Web 2.0. Some say it’s the next .COM bubble (and subsequent burst); others refer to it as a quiet revolution in Internet based technologies.

In his presentation Stefan Korn explores the various themes that are generally associated with Web 2.0 and uncovers the major underlying trends. Marketeers and company directors will be interested to hear about the most common business models currently used in a Web 2.0 environment. If you have ever wondered how to actually make money with Web 2.0 this talk is for you. Developers and IT managers will be interested to find out how revamped scripting languages like AJAX, open source tools and online collaboration drive Web 2.0 sites.

Stefan will conclude with an outlook on current developments in the Web 2.0 arena and predictions about their impact on business and society.

File Download (61:28 min / 21 MB)

The Geonet Project - Monitoring Geological Hazards in New Zealand

Wellington Branch — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +1200

New Zealanders live on the edge. Depending on their location, it might be the edge of the Australian Plate, or it might be the edge of the Pacific Plate.

The active Pacific-Australian Plate boundary passes through New Zealand producing earthquakes, volcanoes, steep terrain and active deformation. GeoNet is a project to build and operate a modern geological hazard monitoring system in New Zealand.

When complete, GeoNet will comprise a network of geophysical instruments, automated software applications and skilled staff to detect, analyse and respond to earthquakes, volcanic activity, large landslides, tsunami, and the slow deformation that precedes large earthquakes.

This talk from Geoff Clitheroe highlights some of the significant technical challenges of installing and operating the remote network and providing the data collected to the public.

File Download (57:23 min / 20 MB)