We were recently directed to Text, Tweet, or Talk: Communication for Today, a newly launched blog written by Michele Davis, an undergraduate student and friend of Cutter. Michele is exploring trends in interpersonal communication and what effects these trends have on society. She’s specifically looking at the impact of the movement away from face-to-face/voice communication […]

Last December, we asked the Cutter Business Technology Council to provide some advice for surviving the recession. Since there are now some signs that things are beginning to turn around, we thought it would be interesting to see what the Council thinks will be different as we emerge from the recession. The consensus: Post-recovery ≠ […]

Wolfram|Alpha is described as having four key components:

An ever-growing repository of underlying curated data piped in and stored on Wolfram Research systems, complementing the existing computable data stores already available through Mathematica.
5-6M lines of computational code repurposed from the Mathematica software kernel
Rudimentary natural language processing (NLP) capability, which is optimized for this specific domain, and […]

Earlier this month, via web conference, I had the privilege of participating in a live demo of the pre-release Wolfram|Alpha, presented in person by Mr. Wolfram, and had the opportunity to ask questions during the call. Subsequently, I received an invitation-only access to use the Wolfram|Alpha test application. The following is based on my notes […]

Based on his previous groundbreaking successes in the fields of computational science and mathematics, my expectations are high for Wolfram|Alpha, a new venture by Stephen “Mathematica” Wolfram, also author of 2002’s soaring 1280-page book entitled A New Kind of Science. Mr. Wolfram’s blog entry states:
It’s going to be a website: WolframAlpha.com. With one simple input […]

I am, by all accounts, a news junkie. I take two papers every day and three on Sundays. I subscribe to a number of magazines and any number of news feeds. My startup page on the Internet is “Google News.” I have the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall […]

Most of the major organizations that I work with have little idea of how fragile their IT architecture is. Most have large numbers of aging core applications that they lack the guts (or resources) to replace. Like the bridges that unexpectedly give way under loads tens of times more than they were designed to carry, […]

Funny how some days everything you look at seems related. This morning I was catching up on my Cutter reading list. I was sucked in by Steve Andriole’s recent Business-IT Strategies Advisor, “The Subtle, the Sublime, and the Nefarious: What We Don’t See Sometimes Tells Us.” It’s a short piece on reading between the lines. […]

My colleague, Kim Leonard, highlighted some of the first analyses of Cutter’s recent study on software estimation back in November (Software estimation “a tough beast to control“). Elli Bennatan’s analysis is ongoing; here are some of the latest highlights:
In 2002, the most common remedy for schedule problems was overtime. Now, six years later, a Cutter […]

In the light of the hype over Web 2.0 this past year, I want to stress that organizations are making use of the techniques to improve the collaboration capabilities of their BI and business performance management initiatives. In fact, according to the results of our recent survey, slightly more than one-quarter of end-user organizations are […]