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.

When the Cutter IT folks approached me with the idea of writing another IT advisor and suggested topics such as "what keeps you up at night?" (among others), it hit a nerve as I thought about where the IT industry is at, and how far we have progressed (or not).

Customer relationship management (CRM) has emerged as the next major wave in the movement of firms toward the goal of tying together their value chain through the use of enterprise-level information technology.

I was visiting a client recently and was asked: "What do you think the future of Web services is? How quickly do you think it will happen?" I gave my standard response to these questions: I don't know.

E-mail is an integral part of the communication structure within organizations and is frequently the basis of collaborative communication between researchers and developers on projects undertaken at multiple locations. Did you know that the average employee spends four working weeks a year on e-mail communication?