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.

In our prior Business-IT Strategies E-Mail Advisor ( 9 January 2002), we introduced a discussion of our view that history matters when implementing customer relationship management (CRM) in the context of previous (or ongoing) enterprise resource planning (ERP) efforts.

IBM has been running commercials on TV and ads in major magazines arguing that senior executives need to learn about infrastructure. The basic ad, for example has a headline that says:

75% OF ALL IT DOLLARS GO TO INFRASTRUCTURE: Isn't it time you learned what it is?

In a recent IEEE Software column (Goth, G., "Federal Government Calls for More Secure Software Design," IEEE Software, Volume 10 Number 1, January/February 2002, pp.