Helen Han

Two years in the making, rego.act, Canberra's A$6 million (US$4.4 million) vehicle registration and driver licensing project, scales to 600 concurrent users and gives the public 24x7 access to the Australian Capital Territory's (ACT) Road Transport Authority's (RTA) business transaction processing.

A massive wave of IT redundancies will hit Australian shores in the next few years with local vendor-based jobs moving to offshore outsourcing markets on a "substantial" scale, a senior Gartner Inc. researcher has warned.

Russia is poised to be a major player in the offshore outsourcing market with hourly contractor rates around 40 per cent lower than the market leader India.

Australian IT professionals and enterprises are short-changing themselves on strategic vision limiting their career and profit prospects, effectiveness and strategic focus. Swamped by a sea of day-to-day operations, today's IT staff need to learn to keep their heads above water and appreciate their enterprise's big picture - or sink.

Short-term focus on CRM (customer relationship management) initiatives leaves financial institutions struggling to achieve top and bottom-line growth through such projects, according to a market analyst.

Experimenting with new technologies is not for the current tough economic climate, according to a survey of chief information officers who remain "guarded" about purchasing plans for the year.

Application integration will be the number one priority for IT managers seeking a competitive e-business advantage over the next five years, according to market analysts Gartner Group.