Once again, we come to the holiday season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.
Dave Barry

Dear Vorticians,

Sometimes, no matter what my grand plan is for the week, critical news developments must take precedence. This is one of those weeks. I had a topic in mind, but it will have to wait for a moment until I tell you the news - and it's good news for a change.

Are you ready? Scientists at Xerox have developed a way to copy pages from a bound book - without damaging the spine! Yes, it's true. You'll never have to crush down that encyclopedia (geography to hypothalamus) just to copy a photo of a hippopotamus for your science report. A scientist from Xerox's Webster, N.Y., research facility broke the news to the scientific world at the 5th International Conference on Imaging Science and Hard Copy in Xi'an, China. According to Xerox, the cure for this literary scoliosis problem involves - and I quote directly from the press release - "a mathematical formula than can be incorporated into the software of common scanners."

That's a little more science talk than I can easily absorb, so I'll go back to the topic I was going to cover this week. Unfortunately, it'll sound so mundane compared to this book-copying stuff. It's, well, it's patching.

Yes, patching. The annoying job of keeping software shored up against security threats and to repair other flaws. It does sound mundane, doesn't it?

But the sad reality is that patching costs businesses millions, maybe billions. That includes not only the time and resources required to actually do all the patching, as well as patching the patches, but also losses from attacks and problems caused by not patching. It's dizzying, isn't it?

On an event tour, I spent last week talking to IT executives about key issues for 2005 and patching was right up there at the head of the class. Yes, they are enthused about virtualization, mobility and services-oriented architectures. But there's this little problem called patching....

Not only are they increasingly strapped by the amount of work involved in keeping up with patches from major vendors like Microsoft, they're increasingly angry about this upward-leaping monkey.

What does that mean? In one management course I took years ago, I was warned against upward-leaping monkeys - meaning problems that employees shift from their backs to yours. The imagery is pretty good. Someone you manage walks in with a monkey (problem) on his back, you wade in to help him and - voila - next thing you know, the monkey's on your back and your employee walks out smiling and monkey free.