In a recent survey by Cutter Consortium of some 130 companies around the world, we found that business process analysis and redesign was a pressing issue at most companies. Of the responding companies, 83% are engaged in some kind of business process redesign today, and about the same number indicated that they would be doing more business process redesign in the near future.

One of the most essential activities in planning for the next release of a software system is specifying its required functionality. Unfortunately, serious mistakes can be made when planners fail to distinguish between functionality and the underlying capability of the architecture required to delivery this functionality.

"Can-do thinking makes risk management impossible. Since acknowledging real risk is defeatism, the risk management function in a can-do organization is restricted to dealing with those smallish risks that can be mitigated by quick action.

Two recent articles paint entirely different pictures of the impact of the current recession on the offshore IT industry.

The limitations of employee and organizational situational awareness and action space constitute important practical issues in any organization.

Okay, so you've had your fill of ad hoc projects, each one done differently, most of them late, over budget, and plagued with more than their share of bugs. You're convinced that you need to impose order on the chaos and come up with a defined software development process.

In our two previous Business-IT Strategies E-Mail Advisors ( 9 and 23 January) we introduced discussions of our view that history matters when implementing customer relationship management (CRM) in the context of previous (or ongoing) enterprise resource planning (ERP) efforts.

I was on a conference call recently with a project that wasn't going well. The engineering team and the customer team were worried, but they were making progress, so they were ready to take the next step. In walks the project manager. "If we don't get the bug count down, we're going to get sued."

Second-generation systematic and people-centric knowledge management (KM) is regularly pursued by proactive enterprises throughout the world. Companies, public institutions, and military organizations are among those that benefit from KM. However, not all attempts at pursuing KM are successful. Often, efforts fail to live up to expectations and managers wonder why.

Mark Cotteleer and Laura Richards, contributing authors for Cutter's Business-IT Strategies Advisory Service, have been doing a series of articles on customer relationship management (CRM) and I've been reading them with interest.

I know people who work 12 hours a day, six days a week, or more. Some people do so because of a work emergency where the long hours are only temporary. Other people I know have put in these hours for years. I don't know if they are working all these hours, but I do know they are in the office this long. Others put in long office hours because they are addicted to the workplace.