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Warwick Ashford rounds up the UK IT news highlights according to Computer Weekly, for the week ending 23 May 2008, together with a look ahead at the news agenda for the coming week.

Stories include: London Stock Exchange recoups £40m cost of electronic trading platform in under 12 months; and the UK Identity and Passport Service awards ID card contracts worth 1.5 billion pounds over 10 years.

There are many factors that can cause a software development project to run into problems. The most common are imprecise specifications, insufficient planning and analysis, poor project management, continually moving goalposts, unrealistically short timescales, weak quality assurance and underestimated costs. In this podcast Cliff Saran speaks to Paul Michaels, director of consulting at Metri measurement consulting, about how to steer a software development project in the right direction.

BMW is two-thirds of the way through a three year green IT programme to improve the efficiency of its data centres.

In Munich BMW’s data data centres are taking ground water from the city council to cool the data centre using a heat exchanger. BMW pumps the water from its Munich data centre back into the water system at a more manageable temperature, which warms up the mains water coming out of household taps in winter. BMW is also using gas from a waste dump, to generate electricity for its data centre in South Carolina.

In this interview Cliff Saran speaks to Bennie Vorster, vice president, IT solutions & technology standards at BMW Group about the programme, which is using renewable energy resources to lower cooling costs in its data centres.

Last week, the Internet was buzzing with news some research had been published based on data that was recovered from a hard disc on the Columbia space shuttle which exploded in 2003, killing its seven crew.

Data recovery specialist Kroll Ontrack recovered data from the mission stored on a 400 Mbyte hard disc that fell to earth.

The data on the disc was the result of 370 hours of experiments that cost the US government millions of dollars. In this podcast Cliff Saran interviews Jeff Pederson, manager of data recovery operations at Kroll Ontrack about the task of saving the data from the experiments.

The responsibility for business continuity has to reside at the highest level or any organisation and not just with the IT department. Russell Price of the Continuity Forum talks to Computer Weekly's Warwick Ashford about the issues involved.

As the bid for Yahoo quietens down, Microsoft has revamped its Live Search engine, expanding the types of searches users can run.

In this telephone Cliff Saran speaks to Brad Goldberg, general manager, search engine business at Microsoft. Goldberg believs the company is well-positioned to be a strong search engine company. He says Microsoft has been making long term investments in data centres and search technology to become the alternative to Google.

Microsoft hired Kevin Turner to be its Chief Operating Officer and offered him base salary of $570,000 (£285,000) per year and a $7m (£3.5m) up-front payment in 2005.

Kevin Turner, previously CIO at Wal-Mart, gives his top tips in six minutes on how IT staff can make the progression to managers and earn the big bucks.

Powering and cooling data centres can be expensive if done incorrectly. Gartner analyst Rakesh Kumar gives the latest advice on how to spot the symptoms of a data centre under stress and how to control and measure power to correct the problem.

Weekly IT news round-up from Warwick Ashford at ComputerWeekly.com. This week: The New York Stock Exchange implementing off the shelf technology to cut time taken to access business critical data; and MPs aks questions about what really went wrong at Heathrow’s Terminal 5: people, processes, or IT?

Oisin Walton of Telecoms Sans Frontières talks to ComputerWeekly.com's Cliff Saran about establishing emergency telecommunations in disaster relief situations, including the technical solutions available, and how volunteers are trained for field work in an emergency situation.