Comments on: Culture Clash

By: Under the Radar » Blog Archive » Don’t Be Afraid of Open Source…

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 04:37:46 +0000

[...] Reading a recent post on Jeff Nolan’s blog who was responding to Tara Hunt’s post about Embracing the Chaos inspired me to tell you about something… Tomorrow night we ‘re holding an Under the Radar (evening) featuring companies that are helping enterprises embrace the Open Source opportunity. Why this topic? For now, we see management solutions as one of the better business propositions in this space. [...]

By: Alison Murdock

Alison Murdock — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 17:45:44 +0000

Tomorrow night at Jeff’s old digs – we’re doing a little UTR featuring 4 companies in the Open Source management solution space:
http://www.ibdnetwork.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=178

-Black Duck
-Spike Source
-Open Country
-Groundwork
We’re doing this because one of the things we’ve heard repeatedly from CIOs is that while Open Source promises a lot, it’s a terrifying proposition. We think any company who understands this and can build a business around minimizing risk exposure will do well.

By: Thomas Otter

Thomas Otter — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 06:49:46 +0000

Chaos has is place, but so does order.
A quick glance at the Google job board. There are 73 open positions in finance, including this one. http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=43634

By: vinnie mirchandani

vinnie mirchandani — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 18:17:02 +0000

Tara – “everyone advocates for business”? I would suggest for the 10X it generates in IT dollars compared to consumer markets , it gets far less media, blog etc interest. Which is why we started the Enterprise Irregulars.

Look at Techmeme or even MSM like NY Times or WSJ…their coverage of tech tends to be overwhelmingly consumer as I wrote below

http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2006/03/is_the_media_bi.html

By: vinnie mirchandani

vinnie mirchandani — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 18:11:01 +0000

Jeff, I agree – most CIOs are acutely sensitive to what the business wants. If the users can do stuff on their own and yet have it not muck up corporate standards we would have the best of both worlds!

By: Tara Hunt

Tara Hunt — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 17:39:30 +0000

Oh…and where I talk about why I’m extreme (I don’t mean to be ‘antithetical’, I’ve just had some experience with that pendulum):

http://www.horsepigcow.com/2006/08/missing-point.html

By: Tara Hunt

Tara Hunt — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 17:37:50 +0000

I’m not anti-enterprise…just disinterested in the focus on it. Everyone advocates for business…I am just working at balancing the scales:

http://citizenagency.com/blog/2006/10/17/balancing-the-scales/

Believe me…I want everyone to make money…I just see another viewpoint. I certainly hope offering alternative viewpoints isn’t something that is branded at bigotry. That’s downright sad.

By: Jeff Nolan

Jeff Nolan — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 15:18:57 +0000

Vinnie,
You bring up a very good point that is something we should talk about. Prior generations of tightly coupled and centralized technology invoked serious consequences when something went wrong. Having said that, in the world we have been operating in, and will continue to go more deeply into, applications that are loosely coupled and far more predictable in their interactions and scaling might not have those same consequences. In other words, if as an industry we can’t improve the reliability of our technology and minimize the risks for the CIO then we are not doing our job.

What I spend a lot of time thinking about are applications that spread through viral mechanisms rather than through centralized deployment, require no training, and because the costs are so low they can be discarded if they don’t work as advertised or something better comes along. Isn’t this what you write about all the time, that IT vendors need to make the path to ROI immediate by lowering costs they impose on the CIO?

By: Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 13:05:09 +0000

Tara – you may be doing a great job as a customer advocate with which I have no criticism whatsoever. But whether you like it or not, sooner or later you have to work with Enterprise in whatever guise.

In my eyes you’re demonstrating the exact antithesis of what social computing should be about – cooperation. In that, you’re no better than those executives who bitch about the ‘unruly mob.’ If anything you make it worse.

On your blog you imply you’re disillusioned with big business. Here you say you’re not interrested in ‘enterprise’ – fine – but does that colour your thinking for all time? If so, then do you not run the risk of being branded a bigot? I’m sure that’s not your intention but your position could easily be seen in that way.

By: vinnie mirchandani

vinnie mirchandani — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 12:38:25 +0000

Jeff, most CIOs I talk to know end user acquisitions (“rogue” to them, liberated to you) happen all the time. It’s when those same users come to IT and expect support and bitch at IT when the support is poor or lacking that the CIO says – if we need an enterprise license for this stuff, we need to do proper diligence. Dave Watson, CTO of Kaiser who was on my Sandhill panel said he gets a new PDA based app from a doctor in his system almost daily – some extremely clever with the suggestion that Kaiser roll it out broadly. But when he asks them to put a system wide deployment plan, they realize the costs of testing, training etc make the app a lot less clever to deploy or not that broadly attractive to other doctors. If you can find several sponsors in a company, and can meet their broad architectural, scale and security guidelines, there is no reason to bypass IT. The problem is just finding 1-2 sponsors – and hundreds of products finding that small sub-set of sponsorss. Then the “rogues” turns in to a chaotic mob – that is something no corporation tolerates – whether it be in IT or travel policies or marketing ideas.