James Ahern, Chief Architect and Head of Engineering at Daon. He reminisces about Smalltalk, one of the original Object Oriented languages, which he used to build one of General Motors' first OO systems in Europe.

Many people in software engineering have heard about Smalltalk but few have experienced it. I had the pleasure of working with the language for two years in the mid-1990s and I have to say it was, and remains, a revelation. However, 14 years after I worked with it and 30 years on from the ground breaking release of Smalltalk-80, where is it now and why did it not make it to the big time?

Imad Mouline is Chief Strategy Office with Everbridge in the US and has worked on ground-breaking technology throughout his career. In this article, Imad discusses how to measure the cloud so that it can be effectively managed.

As a former CTO for Gomez, I've lived and breathed application performance metrics on a daily basis. But more recently, I've been thinking about how to go beyond the technical metrics and measure the real information that matters to the business.

Peter Kennedy is VP of Programme Management at First Data Corporation in the UK. Here Peter shares his thoughts on why it is important to harness cultural diversity in order to successfully deliver pan-European change programmes.

For me, the most critical part of managing programmes that have stakeholders in more than one European location is to understand other people's culture and have your own culture understood. There are differences amongst European cultures and these trickle down not just into daily life, but into all aspects of business. As in every aspect of life, cultural differences in business can be a positive and powerful element, but can also, if not understood properly, trigger conflict and other issues.

John Holden is a Senior Director with Symantec APJ. In this article, John offers the opinion that it is often bad management that can prevent an organisation achieving the benefits of a global delivery organisation.

Do cultural differences slow you down? How much failure can a manager lay at the feet of traits, behaviour, and other biases that we attribute to our and our employees' cultural heritage? My answer - none, not if you want to keep your job!