The introduction of the euro cash was a runaway success with the public queuing to get rid of the old money on the first day. It was certainly an historic occasion, with 360 million people all facing a new currency at the same time, a rare common experience across Europe. That leaves the DUKS (Denmark, UK, and Sweden) who are wondering whether they should get their feet wet.

It's been approximately five months since the first anthrax attacks took place in the US. Although the attacks ceased as abruptly as they appeared, the healthcare and emergency response systems in this country have been scrambling to implement new technologies and procedures to deal with the next bioterrorist attack, should it come.

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."