CIO Essentials: The top five stories of the week

Ever wondered what CIOs are reading on silicon.com? Our latest feature - CIO Essentials - puts you in the picture. Each week a leading IT chief picks his or her top stories from the past seven days and explains why they matter.

This week we have Peter Birley, director of IT at Browne Jacobson LLP, a top 100 law firm based in the Midlands.

Firms urged to plan for extreme weather
What is the world coming to? After sleepless nights following the warnings of pandemic flu, we now get predictions of extreme weather with the associated dire warnings. It was interesting that one in five IT organisations were recently impacted - which I would have not guessed if you had asked me. It is a serious issue and I agree that we should not just look at business continuity as a cost but also as an investment and certainly it is an area we have, and are continuing to, invest in. The alternative, if these predications are right, is not worth thinking about.

Top 10 uses of an iPod you'd never expect
It never ceases to amaze me what you can do with an iPod, and having discovered all these interesting things, we are just about to introduce some software to stop people connecting them to the network - if only we had known these things earlier.

Green supercomputer is 'go' in Scotland
Not sure I really understood [the bit] about supercomputer 'Maxwell' using FPGAs, and if it was 1 April I might have had a wry smile, but the statistics sound really impressive and obviously something to watch out for in the future. Makes our policies of switching off PCs and closing down monitors when not in use seem a bit tame. Hope they don't test it on a boat in the Atlantic.

Cisco embraces 'videoconferencing as a service'
Videoconferencing always seems a great idea but is difficult to deliver for all sorts of reasons, from booking the rooms to sharing documents and quality of transmission. At a time of wanting improved customer service and the [emphasis on] green issues around reduced travelling, it seems like it should be a no-brainer so I am hoping that with the likes of Cisco getting involved we may see some advancement in this area.

SOA? Get the business involved say IT chiefs
When I saw this, I thought that getting the business involved was great but then we in IT are still struggling trying to define what [SOA] actually is and how we can apply it - or if it is overkill and we would be better off with a web services-type approach. We have had so many new initiatives in the IT world, some just rebranding of past ones, that the business becomes sceptical, so unless we in IT 'get it' and believe in it the business has no chance.

If you are a UK-based IT director or CIO and would like to take part in the CIO Essentials series by choosing your top five stories of the week, send us an email here at silicon.com.