Munir Patel, who worked as a magistrates’ court administrative officer, pleaded guilty today to bribery and misconduct in public office. He admitted to accepting a bribe in connection with a speeding charge at Southwark Crown Court.
Patel pleaded guilty to s.2 of the Bribery Act 2010 for requesting and receiving a £500 bribe for offering to “get rid” of a speeding charge for someone. He also pleaded guilty to misconduct in public office for other similar offences.
One of the largest private sector employers in India, IT services firm IBM is trimming its contract workforce. At least 600-1,000 contract employees have been asked to leave the company since August. Sources in the recruitment industry and the company attribute this to both economic uncertainty and cyclical reasons.
These contract employees work for IBM, but are on the payrolls of either a recruitment firm or another IT vendor. Two of the biggest providers of contract staff to IBM, who did not wish to be named, confirm this. One of them told ET that IBM had asked few hundreds of contract staffers to leave in August.
This vendor lost 40 such staffers, but this month placed 20 again.
Social media, outsourcing and mobility are top-of-mind for Opera Australia CIO, Grant Creswell.
Speaking to CIO Australia about his role at the not-for-profit, Creswell said the business is using social media to communicate with a new generation of Australian opera fans.
“We’ve been doing a lot of things in order to build our younger audience so social media is high on our agenda,” Creswell said.
“We’ve got this great storyline and infrastructure that’s fascinating and we want to extend that through to social media.”
Mobility is another priority for the Sydney based CIO, with Creswell saying Opera Australia staff members are always on the move.
“We’re focusing more on the fact that our people are mobile and everyone in the company has to do things and go somewhere,” he said.
“You get stage managers, company managers, lighting staff, props managers and they are all out there.”
As is the case with many Australian not-for-profits, an investment in outsourcing is important to Creswell, who recently said his game plan is about conserving resources, and as a result, there is only one other staff member working as part of Opera Australia’s internal IT team.
“We have one staff member in IT and her role is really to be the legs on the ground to facilitate things,” he said.
“We make sure that we use products that are well supported…we’re not an IT company, we make opera.”
Next on Opera Australia’s IT agenda are plans to implement an archiving system for the large volume of data the organisation has.
“We’ve got such a large range of old information,” Creswell said. “This includes images, films, video, text,
Zendesk’s Michael Hansen
After launching Zendesk’s Asia Pacific head office in Melbourne this week, new managing director Michael Hansen says that Cloud, customer service and mobility are important for startups to succeed.
What is your role at Zendesk and can you give me some background on what the company does?
I’m Michael Hansen and I’m Zendesk’s vice president and Asia Pacific managing director. Zendesk is Cloud-based help desk software that is the fastest way to enable great customer service in rapidly growing companies. We ar
Crowdsourcing—using the collective talent of the Internet to solve problems—has been increasingly used to solve problems and find solutions in the computer software and electronics industry. Over the past few years, several forward-thinking life scientists had proposed the idea that crowdsourcing could possibly be used to solve the molecular structure of proteins that could be used as drug targets. To bring this possibility to reality, in 2008 a team of scientists at the University of Washington created an online, interactive, protein-folding game call Foldit that showcased the principle and properties of protein biochemistry. The