By Jade Moffat Herman, Corporate Social Responsibility Lead, IBM A/NZ After almost seven years at IBM Australia and New Zealand, you don’t need to tell me how rewarding a career in technology can be. In my role as Corporate Social Responsibility Lead, I am honoured to work closely with leading public sector, not-for-profit and educational organisations to maximise opportunities – and impact – for people hoping to establish their own technology careers. Building these kinds of meaningful partnerships and programs is particularly important now, with the recent uptick in digital transformation in ..read more

By Alison Haire, Lead Developer Advocate, Hybrid Cloud Build Team Solving global challenges like climate change may seem never-ending, but we can draw inspiration and hope from communities that are making a difference. The open-source movement is one such community, involving hundreds of thousands of individuals and organisations around the world. Together, they have created many of the most important digital solutions of our times – from the platforms that run most of the world’s websites to emerging technologies such as blockchain. IBM has supported open-source communities for more than 25 y ..read more

Author: Chris Hockings, Chief Technology Officer (Cyber Security), IBM Australia and New Zealand  As the pandemic accelerated your need for digital transformation, you needed to act. And fast. And you were not alone. But new findings from the recent IBM-Ponemon Institute Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021 suggest that an organisation’s pace of change may have an impact on the cost of data breaches. Respondents were asked to nominate the level of transformation occurring in their organisation due to the pandemic. The report identified a ‘sweet spot’, where organisations with a ‘moderate tra ..read more

Author: Chris Hockings, Chief Technology Officer (Cyber Security), IBM Australia and New Zealand  Cybercriminals can fly under the radar, making one type of breach harder to detect and more costly than others. Credential-related breaches take 250 days to discover, on average, and another 91 days to contain, according to the global IBM-Ponemon Institute Cost of a Data Breach 2021 report. They cost US$4.37 million each, on average, and account for 20 percent of all breaches – making them the most common of all initial attack vectors. It’s a threat that seems to have been exacerbated by the ..read more

Author Ross Farrelly, Director, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, IBM A/NZ You can feel it in the air. Summer’s on its way and there’s a spring in our step. In October, business confidence in NSW leapt by 42pts in September, while Victoria climbed by 16pts.[i] But it’s not just the change of season that is making Australians feel so optimistic. We are also finally emerging from various Covid lockdowns which started back in March 2020 and have been intermittent on various states since then. The post-lockdown economic impact on the Australian economy is forecast to be significant. It’s b ..read more

Author: Katrina Troughton, Managing Director IBM A/NZ According to the World Economic Forum, the inability of employers to find enough skilled workers could cost the global economy US$11.5 trillion in forgone GDP growth by 2028. A high 87 percent of executives also report suffering from the issue.  Here in Australia, the Australian Computing Society and Deloitte have forecast we will need to add about 300,000 technology workers by 2026 to meet demand, taking our technology workforce to well over 1 million. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need for people and busine ..read more

Author: Eric Wong, Customer Success Lead, IBM Australia and New Zealand  It wasn’t all smooth sailing for our client. A 2021 RMIT Online study by Deloitte Access Economics confirms what many of us know from experience – that data science is one of Australia’s most in-demand skill areas. What’s more, the employers surveyed by Deloitte reported their biggest skills gap was in data analysis – that is, they don’t have “the skill level required or skill is out of date”. A few years back this client brought in a team of data scientists for a machine learning project. This was exciting, given th ..read more

By Jessica Vella, Associate Data Scientist – Advanced Analytics and Paul Sherlock, Associate Partner, Offering Lead – Cognitive Care A/NZ Every week, hundreds of young couples take their first step on an exciting, scary, nerve-wracking journey – one of the most important of their lives. They decide to buy a house. If you’ve been on this journey yourself, you know how daunting it can be. You may comb through mountains of research, loads of policies and complicated jargon. You may head to five different company’s websites, trawling through links and documents. And when you finally find a search ..read more

Author: Doug Robinson, Managing Partner, Global Business Services, IBM Australia and New Zealand  If you’re like most IT leaders and other executives I’ve talked to recently, you’ve gone through more than a year of accelerated transformation. No doubt you addressed your organisation’s urgent needs, such as rolling out or upgrading collaboration and other apps to support remote teams. Then, as the pandemic dragged on, you needed to address more fundamental business challenges, perhaps by optimising processes to reduce costs or digitising the supply chain to improve resilience. Take a momen ..read more

Author: Doug Robinson, Managing Partner, Global Business Services, IBM Australia and New Zealand  If you’re like most IT leaders and other executives I’ve talked to recently, you’ve gone through more than a year of accelerated transformation. No doubt you addressed your organisation’s urgent needs, such as rolling out or upgrading collaboration and other apps to support remote teams. Then, as the pandemic dragged on, you needed to address more fundamental business challenges, perhaps by optimising processes to reduce costs or digitising the supply chain to improve resilience. Take a momen ..read more