By Boris Evelson

In my recent BI Belt Tightening For Tough Economic Times document I explored a few low-cost alternatives to traditional, mainstream, and typically relatively expensive Business Intelligence (BI) tools. While some of these alternatives indeed were a fraction of a cost of a characteristic large enterprise BI software license, there were even fewer truly zero cost options. But there were some. For example, you can:

• Leverage and use no-cost bundled BI software already in-house.Small departments and workgroups may be able to leverage BI software that comes bundled at no additional cost with BI appliances, database management systems (DBMSes), and application licenses. You can consider using these few free licenses from Actuate, IBM Cognos, Information Builders, Jaspersoft, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Panorama, Pentaho, and SAP Business Objects for additional functions such as testing, QA, and prototyping. While these few free licenses are just a drop in the bucket in a typical large enterprise BI license requirements, do look around and don’t waste money on BI products you may already have.

While the actual document about Agile usage in the technology industry slowly but majestically navigates through the final editing and production process, I thought I'd share an important bit of data that didn't make it into the report. Shown in the diagram below is the percentage of survey participants who said that they used particular Agile methodologies. We also asked the respondents about other methodologies that often come up in discussions of Agile, either as complementary approaches (for example, Lean), or as points of comparison (Waterfall being the most obvious one).

How many at each table in the Agile seating chart?
As you can tell, there's no clear winner here, other than Scrum, which overshadows every other Agile methodology in adoption. There's another way to look at the same picture: whenever there's a family photo of Agile methodologies, the participants almost always make sure to invite their poor cousins to attend. There are both good and bad sides to that earnestly ecumenical approach.

by Ted Schadler

Microsoft today announced the public beta of Exchange 2010. This product is a natural extension and improvement over Exchange 2007 (and anybody on Exchange 2003 should really be looking at it), but it also introduces at least one important new capability: email archiving.

But I'll let my colleagues explain that in more detail. I want to focus today on one aspect of Exchange 2010 that should matter to information and knowledge management professionals at large firms: saving money by moving occasional users to the cloud.

Microsoft's Software + Service strategy has rapidly matured and is native to Exchange 2010. This architecture of a single environment that spans on-premise and cloud-based gives large firms an opportunity to leave some mailboxes on-premise and host others in the cloud to save money without incurring admin hassles.

Exchange 2010 is the first product that Microsoft has engineered to run as well in the cloud as on-premise. That means it will be easier to split your domain and run a single managed environment (meaning one admin console, one archiving management tool set, one legal hold implementation, one message filtering solution) across an on-premise and cloud-based implementation.

The Dead keep getting votes, but so do the Allmans. The Ramones stay hot, as do the Doors.

Excellent comments to check out:

Beth quotes Jerry:  http://tinyurl.com/c9mgaw

Corey quotes Lou dissing Dead:  http://tinyurl.com/dn4nlh

Ryan writes in the Doors vein:  http://tinyurl.com/dfbbor

Here's the latest ranking:

Allmans
Dead
E Street Band
Doors
Ramones
Aerosmith
Replacements
Beach Boys
Velvet Underground
Phish
Talking Heads
The Band
ZZ Top
Metallica
REM
Nirvana
Guns N' Roses
Pearl Jam
Eagles
Black Crows
Creedence
CSN
Foo Fighters
Fugazi
Jefferson Airplane
Little Feat
NRBQ
Rush
Stooges
Tom Petty and Heartbreakers
White Stripes
Wilco
Sonic Youth
REM
Crazy Horse (Neil Young)
Clutch
Chili Peppers
Parliament/Funkadelic
Toto
The Byrds
Widespread Panic

By Dr. Natalie Petouhoff

In covering Customer Service, I have divided the topic into three aspects:

• “Get the Basics Right”
• “Understand the Business of Customer Service"
• “Plan for the Future of Customer Service.”

I just published a document, “How To Win Funding For Your Customer Service Project." Forrester suggests to standardize the process and template for a business case. We use the discipline Total Economic Impact™ to calculate the ROI for an initiative. I’m hearing from a lot of my clients that in order to get their project approved, they need to justify it.

Today I had an inquiry call from a vendor that wanted to know how best to standardize the business justification process. They are finding that they can’t even get a meeting, or if they do, then one of the first sales objections of their clients is, “What is the ROI of this solution?"