One of the difficulties of managing projects that involve several (perhaps many) organizations is that the group has no pre-established procedures for handling actions that cross organizational boundaries.

The origin of this paper goes back to the International Conference "Phenomenology and Technology" held at the Philosophy and Technology Studies Center, Polytechnic University (New York), October 2- 4, 1986 which was organized by Wolfgang Schirmacher and Carl Mitcham. After thirteen years, obviously, things have changed and I have done some further work too. My book Hermeneutik der Fachinformation was published in 1986 and since then I have written some articles on this subject as well as another book Leben im Informationszeitalter (Capurro 1995). Some of the articles as well as a list of publications can be found in my homepage (http://www.capurro.de). The present text is an enriched version of the original one. I have added some later insights without changing the basic ideas which I still think are valuable and can also be of help when reflecting, for instance, about the nature of communicating and searching for information in the Internet.

Has the discipline of cybernetics been unable to recognize and respond to appropriate "midcourse corrections" and in the process had its destiny imposed by external "turning points"? (A mid-course correction is an endogenously determined action as in the classical "sense-processact" sequence, whereas a turning point is simply a reaction to that which is exogenously imposed; i.e., "being overcome by events."

Are you looking for new ideas to leverage your IT to allow your workforce to collectively be more efficient at solving complex problems? Want to transform your corporation so that it can reach new heights?

Software testing concepts have been briefly described in this article. Readers would find it easier to understand fundamental concepts of software testing by going through a concept map thereof. Software testing is itself a discipline as well as a process. Software development is nothing but a process of coding functionality in order to meet the defined end-user requirements. We can think of software testing as an iterative process, which consists of Tests Designing, Tests Execution, Problems Identifying and Problem Fixing, for validating functionality and as well as for attempting the software break. Software testing aims to find problems and to fix them for improving software quality. Software testing may represent 40% of a software development budget. Basic methods of performing software testing include Manual Testing and Automated Testing. Manual software testing is the process of manually testing software (having the possible forms for example, user interfaces navigation, information submission, or attempt to hack the software or database etc.), carried out by an individual or individuals. Manual software testing is labor-intensive and slow. On the other hand, automated software testing is a process of creating test scripts, which can be run then automatically, repetitively, and through a number of iterations. Automated software testing helps us to minimize the variability of results, speed up the testing process, increase test coverage (that is, the number of different things tested), and ultimately provide greater confidence in the quality of the software being tested.

Time to end personal technology serfdom! I hate company-specific technology standards, at least those that specify technology in terms other than file formats, access protocols and application programming interfaces. In most companies I am in touch with, employees get a laptop and a cell phone and are required to use a set of standard capabilities of some sort. More often than not these are unnecessarily complicated, old-fashioned, expensive and singularly uninspiring. This is often for good reasons: The IT department wants to make things manageable for themselves and for the organization, and employees need to have a standard frame of reference and a compatible set of tools for work. The helpdesk can figure out which keys to press and the employees can see the same screens. Well and good, but the users are beginning to rebel at the lack of options especially those they have on their own or former computers.