CIO Essentials: iTunes, Glastonbury tickets and Bluetooth ads

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 Tony Johnson, IT director at Virgin Retail.

Will's Web Watch: Glastonbury and lessons in uptime
A useful example of where technology has failed to address an age-old problem of effectively managing a situation where demand clearly outstrips supply. Technology has merely shifted the customer's frustration from permanently engaged telephones to crashing web pages. The only solace I take from Will's experiences is the fact it demonstrates how passionate people still are about music.

Apple to sell DRM-free music through iTunes
This story gives me some hope there is a future for the legitimate digital music industry. A brave decision from EMI but one that is long overdue, in my personal opinion. It will be very interesting to see how the other major record companies respond.

DRM-free tunes coming to the Zune too?
To date, the legal downloading industry has comprehensively failed to deal with the reality and scale of illegal file-sharing. By opening up the inter-operability of legal downloading and going some way to de-mystifying the whole process by removing DRM, albeit at a premium initially on individual tracks, it starts to become a much more compelling proposition for the consumer.

Give IT managers incentive to go green, says HP
A topic that is increasingly at the forefront of much of what we do in Virgin, as I am sure it is in other organisations. This article effectively highlights one of the key challenges for the IT director in going green - which is to make a case for capital investment in more environmentally efficient hardware, when it is not necessarily the cheapest option. Having said that, I don't think we should lose sight of the fact there are plenty of other ways in which we can strive to become 'greener' - through the use of good practice and common sense in managing power consumption, for instance.

The wholesale replacement of all desktops, servers etc, which after all is something the likes of HP and other hardware vendors have a strong vested interest in seeing happen, is not necessarily the only answer to this issue. We should remember that with any replacement programme comes the other environmental issue of WEEE compliant device disposal.

HSBC pushes mobile ads via Bluetooth
I will await the results of this trial with great interest. As the mobile phone increasingly becomes the centre of everything that we do whilst on the move, it is an obvious next step to target it with marketing messages. However, extreme caution is required here and careful targeting of willing recipients is a pre-requisite. I'm not sure HSBC have quite achieved this by sending a first message to ask whether the customer would like a further promotional message. The danger of alienating consumers to your brand via unsolicited messaging is considerable. I think there needs to be the ability to identify willing recipients upfront, via collaboration with the mobile networks, for this kind of promotional messaging to achieve its potential.

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.