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4 December 2006
But seriously
Security remains high on the CIO agenda, dreams of helicopters and communications satellites notwithstanding. Says BCX's Winterbach: “I'd go to all the other CIOs with unlimited budget, call a meeting, pool funds and start a war against spam and virus creators. Then we can avoid the overhead of anti-this anti-that, anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-hacker and so on.”
New approaches
"Change the whole way licensing works."
Hugo Winterbach, CIO, BCX
Hugo Winterbach, CIO, BCX
Van der Merwe also lists investment on disaster recovery programmes and business continuity management (processing/bandwidth/facilities, infrastructure and accommodation) for all platforms.
Echoing local business's increasing interest in open source technologies, Storm Telecom's Gale says he would like desktop applications that work 100% like Microsoft's, but run on Linux, while Keats says he'd “replace every single Microsoft Windows computer on the campus with one running GNU/Linux (preferably a laptop) and make sure all staff and students (the easy part) are au fait with the Gnome or KDE desktop and understand how to maximise the improvements the software would make to their lives.”
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| Storm's Dave Gale is dreaming big. |
Better than that, he adds, would be to join forces again with his colleagues with unlimited budgets, hire Richard Branson as a consultant and change licence systems so that we have something like a national or country licence. The aim, he says, is to “change the whole way licensing works, so that the companies involved still get their money but maybe a little less than they do now.”
The D word
Says UWC's Keats: “I would speed up our development efforts and, as quickly as possible, eliminate all proprietary software from our infrastructure, replacing it with free software, making sure that we had the skills to develop, deploy, support and train.”
Gale would like “elvish software developers that develop code overnight, thus meeting the CEO's idea of reasonable project deadlines. The code, of course, would be fully commented and documented.”
Proving that some CIOs really do dream big, Gale also wants “first level help-desk staff with Network+ and MCSEs, and a degree in linguistics to interpret what users are actually saying, middleware that integrates all our business systems with drag-and-drop functionality, and business analysts who have the energy of 18-year-olds, the wisdom of 60-year-olds and the negotiation skills of Nelson Mandela.”
BCX's Winterbach dreams even bigger, saying that “a good Christmas box would be a user that can specify his or her needs the first time around”.
Next page: Upward delegation
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