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This article focuses on the disaster recovery plans of information technology (IT) managers in Houston, Texas as Hurricane Rita occurred in the area. Some IT managers kept in mind lessons that they learned when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005. For instance, Houston-based Allied Home Mortgage Capital Corp. was busy arranging for temporary executive office spaces in Dallas, Texas and moving key employees there to continue operations until it is safe to return. In addition, an analyst at Gartner Inc. said that there had been a tremendous increase in the number of companies seeking third-party off-site hosting facilities for their data, IT and business systems since the Katrina incident. INSET: Gulf Coast Recovering As Rita Looms.

This article highlights the system development approach at Rent-A-Center Inc., which could be sum up to one word referring to flexibility. Flexibility in project management. Flexibility in technical architecture. And flexibility in application design. These three ingredients came together when the 2.3 billion-dollar, Plano, Texas-based chain of merchandise rental stores overhauled its human resources system and put wireless hiring kiosks and thin clients into nearly 3,000 sites across the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico. INSET: READY, SET, GO!.

This article reports that the state of Texas is thinking about replacing vehicle inspection stickers with RFID tags. The state likes the idea because it would enable drive-by enforcement of insurance requirements. Texas wants to scan cars on the fly. That requires high-frequency RFID tags that can respond quickly and at a distance. Those tags also typically can hold lots of data. So a vehicle inspection RFID tag could contain as much as a megabyte of information about a vehicle. One way is to use low-powered tags that can be read only up close. But that doesn't require RFID. There's already an identifying tag that police routinely use for checking vehicle information. It's called a license plate.