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One of the critical goals of automation is to instantaneously connect problems with the best and most readily available people to solve them. You could say if such a goal were truly achieved in an organization, an entire tier of middle management would be eliminated. And you may want to remind me, if you can, why that would be a bad thing.

An emerging class of middle-tier services in the cloud-driven SaaS model is the "decision engine" - essentially the algorithms and methods that produce results, and let the front end program handle the delivery and execution of those results. In an IT service organization, one such engine making inroads with a growing number of front ends (including just this week CA Service Desk Manager) comes from a company called xMatters, which calls its service a relevance engine.

Since Microsoft launched Bing, the company has been trying to position it as a 'decision engine' and not just as another search engine. Today, Microsoft is taking another step in this direction with the launch of Visual Search in Bing. For a growing number of searches, instead of giving users a list of 10 blue links, Bing will now give users the option to visualize the search results on a 3D grid with icons or photos. Now, for example, if you search for 'Top iPhone Apps,' Bing will not just present a list of links to other sites but also provide the option to show you those iPhone apps directly in Bing, with the added ability to filter them by price, category, or publisher.