This month's CBR is particularly important because what we have on our hands may be shaping up as a big crisis that, to be successfully addressed, requires joint efforts from different communities that seldom interact. I am not going to use cheesy terms such as "a perfect storm," but what we can see is, on the one hand, dropping enrollments in computer science degrees and increasingly limited number of mainframe skills being developed in universities; while on the other hand, mainframes continue to run many of the large mission-critical software applications of modern organizations. On the "third hand" (or the underhand as the famous blues song goes) is the lack of awareness and planning for the impending mass retirement of the baby boomers who hold the great majority of mainframe skills and knowledge today.

BI is an area of great interest, one that deserves our attention and analysis. Therefore, for this issue, we tapped the expertise of two individuals with a few decades of combined expertise in the field. Our objective is to benchmark the state of BI and allow our authors to comment on the emergent lessons.

This month's Cutter Benchmark Review is the second in our annual series on IT budgets and the IT budgeting process. The budgeting process is one of critical importance to IT and business professionals in our subscriber base. This is perhaps even more important today as we continue to see a recovery in IT spending as well as the shifting of priorities away from a narrow focus on cost cutting and efficiency (a trend that we picked up in last year's data).