In my last Trends Advisor (see "Wolfram|Alpha and the Future of Mathematics," 11 June 2009), I suggested that Wolfram|Alpha, which I'll refer to simply as "Alpha," was a potentially game-changing event in mathematical and scientific education. As luck would have it, I was at a Semantic Technology conference last week, and one of the sessions involved an open interview with one of Alpha's lead developers. Nothing that I found out there changed my fundamental view of the importance of Alpha and other similar tools, but it did cause me to go back and investigate Alpha in more depth. One of the things that caught my attention was an interview with Stephen Wolfram himself regarding the thought process behind this new tool.

Recruiting is an important and sometimes overlooked portion of the IT portfolio. Its functions orchestrate the talent available to the firm and ensure that the right people with the right training are available to perform the jobs required for the firm to succeed. The processes falling within this area affect both the IT department and the corporation at large.

The rapid growth of the software as a service (SaaS) market, along with the closely related cloud computing industry, is attracting a proliferation of players that is creating a buyer's market for customers and raising concerns about an inevitable industry shakeout. This Executive Update examines the rapidly evolving SaaS competitive landscape and discusses the long-term implications of these trends. This is the third in a series of Updates based on Cutter's most recent SaaS survey.

There are five things that everyone better do over the next 12-18 months: 1) rethink and (re-) develop your overall business technology strategies; 2) redesign and redeploy your computing and communications architectures; 3) rethink and re-implement your technology delivery strategies; 4) re-organize your technology organizations with special attention to business technology skills gaps; 5) identify and implement meaningful and measurable technology performance metrics. These five areas define the decisions that must be made as the business technology field fundamentally changes from the world we understood just five years ago. Is there some urgency here? Absolutely, because the nature of the changes we've been tracking is so profound that a misstep here could cost a great deal of time, effort and money.