Vito Forte, CIO, Fortescue Metals Group

The maturity is there, we're going to save money by doing it, and the performance is great and capability is what we want. These days it's not an issue to be moving away from those sorts of innovation sets.

We're looking at how we're going to bring at the same time traditional commercial IT and with operational research, process controls and those sorts of things. Smartphones, tablets, whatever - the question is: How do we leverage the consumerisation within the mining context?

For example, we have a project at the moment in other words looking at optimisation and a bunch of modelling activity, and we're providing as much as we can in terms of capacity and capability. We're offering some input around more efficient methods of dealing with the large amount of data involved. However, in the long run, it's however the mining operation's data. [[leftquote: We want to make the business successful, not just make IT look good. ]] What's more important to us is not to become a bottleneck. We say: What is it we can enable in order for the business to get the outcome it needs? We want to make the business successful, not just make IT look good.

Distributed workforces are challenging in a general sense simply because of the geography associated with our locations. We've become pretty good at building and putting in the infrastructure we need to support our business activities. However there are always challenges when you're working remote areas because there is just nothing there.

One of the key mantras for me at this stage is that capacity will not be a constraint for the business. We're making sure we finish that off. We don't want to hear we could get a lot more value out of a project if only we'd had a bigger pipe.

We're talking to the CSIRO at this stage about some future state technologies in the communications area that we're looking to take advantage of as quickly as we can.

Getting actionable data in the hands of the right decision makers translates to positive business outcomes - whether that means competing more effectively, reducing operational costs, meeting compliance requirements, or ...