This should be encouraging to many.

As Technology Needs Grow, One Sector Has No Shortage of Jobs ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/12/AR2009071202016.html?referrer=emailarticle
)
By Kim Hart
Platinum Solutions, a Reston information technology firm that serves the government, needs to find new employees so fast that it hired four full-time recruiters. At any given time, the company has 20 to 40 job openings, and it recently opened an office in West Virginia that has 65 employees.

Check out Bing.com

Check out bing.com when you get a chance. While Microsoft has a history of copyvcatting others, this actually seems to be more useful than google.com for search in some ways. I just tested it once in a search on a vacation spot we're headed to, and it gave far better results. Please post your successes/failures with this new entry to the search market. I'll be curious to see what you find.

Detroit bailout, put in IT terms

I loved this quote from Tom Friedman (of "The World is Flat" fame), which describes the way we will look back on the Detroit bailout some day, in IT terminology.

". . .our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into the CD music business on the eve of the birth of the iPod and iTunes. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into a book-store chain on the eve of the birth of Amazon.com and the Kindle. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into improving typewriters on the eve of the birth of the PC and the Internet."

Howard Dresner's New Book

Howard Dresner, who is the chief guru of Business Intelligence, is coming out with a new book soon, called "Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change." Although he had originally thought it would be an implementation guide to Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), after looking in detail at the way four companies from different sectors implemented BI, he learned "that "culture", and not technology, was the deciding factor for success or failure. By culture I mean people and groups of people - their beliefs, motives, attitudes, organization, customs, processes, etc." Once again, people and the ways they interact seem to be more important than ever in the success or failure of systems. Based on Howard's earlier works, I expect this will be a fascinating read.

The Growing Importance of BI

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc2009032_101762.htm

This is an interesting article on the growing importance of Business Intelligence (BI) software in this economy. BI software was ranked at the top of the list of technology spending priorities for 2009, according to Gartner. It is used in the restaurant industry for making decisions on optimal staffing levels and what should continue to appear on the menu. Large vendors, such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and IBM see this trend and have responded by taking over smaller BI vendors.

Interesting article about E-Commerce Decision-Making Using Data

See this article in the NYT. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/business/media/31ad.html?em

Basically, this article says how important the analysis of all the clickstream data that is collected is for advertising decision-making.

Wolfram Alpha

An interesting development in search engines is WolframAlpha. If you're interested in signing up for this go to www.wolframalpha.com. They are only going to give it out carefully in the beginning I guess, but it doesn't hurt to sign up. Apparently it is going to use a lot of data mining techniques to bring up more accurate search results.