Yesterday Totto noticed me of this Gartner blog about how CIO's should answer when asked about what IT contributes to the enterprise. Mark McDonald suggest that the answer should be how IT contributes to the core business model. This way it can be shed some light on how business models and IT can both be improved to be better positioned against the competition.
Another blog post that caught my interest yesterday was Matt Asay's
Cloud computing: A natural conclusion of open source? Here Asay is writing about Tim O'Reilly's prediction that Cloud Computing will make Open Source licenses irrelevant. A bit far from what my post is about, but it stresses that new software will be consuming/provider of services. In order for new software based on the SOA/Cloud Computing paradigms, open data formats and open standards will be quite important. Open Source is a natural way of implementing both data formats and standards, and hopefully this is going to happen. Even inside enterprises these thoughts should be considered, so it will be possible to combine the result of different development efforts to create even more valuable software to support the core business model.
2 days ago, I fell in love with this blogpost from Rickard Öberg about quickness. Although this post is about quickness at the individual developer and team level, it applies to organizations as well. To quickly reposition against the competition and market demand, sharp services exposing open data formats and beeing based on open standards will be crucial.
The CIO should understand what Open can do for the core business model, as this will be utterly important as more software is SOA based, running in the cloud. The ability to move quickly has been important at all times, but in some ways the changes in paradigms is accelerating and it will be more visible when you does not posess this ability.
