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.
Showing posts with label open innovation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open innovation. Show all posts
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
2 Icons, 2 movements
Last night a thought struck me: there is a striking similarity in how the open source- and snowboarding movements has evolved. Both has been led by strong iconic persons namely Terje Håkonsen and Richard Stallman. They are both controverse untouchables (as in the movie with Kevin Costner), they do and say exactly what they believe in. Their influence has been very important in establishing these movements that is not controlled by any commercial interests, although none of them would have made it this far with commercial support.
Håkonsen is reknown for boycotting the IOC and FIS and olympic qualification for halfpipe when it was introduced in the omlympics. Stallman is so reknowned for his controversery that a lot of people thinks he is just a childish troublemaker.
The reason these movements have become so powerful, even in a commercial sense, is that they consists of large crowds of people. They have to some varying degrees developed ethics and morale, and those not conforming are effectively kind of excluded or frozen out. The crowds is not driven by commercial interests, but it would be false to state that is not commercial interests involved. Snowboarding is not for economically faint hearted, and software development is seldom gratis.
An example showing the power of the Open Source movement: Try to imagine the WWW without the Apache Http Server. It is undeniable the very reason the acronym http is known probably by half or more of the world population. It has lost "market shares", but it is the Apache http Server that has made the widespread deployment of the WWW possible. It has alwasy been on the frontiers of the WWW, and I guess it still is. In addition most application servers has an Apache http Server in front of them to handle caching and serving static content and many other tasks. I think the success for Linux in the server room is largely because of Apache http Server. The Apache Foundation has long been sponsored by IBM.
The Open Source movement has laid a foundation for business, information spreading and social interaction over the internet that would not have taken place or would have looked completely different without it. In fact, I think Open Source has been genuinely good for the internet and computing in general, lowering the bar for adoption. It makes it possible for everyone the freedom of speach if they want to.
Open Source is again showing it's strength in times where financial crisis otherwise might have strangled innovation. Instead innovation on the internet is flourishing, largely powered by Open Source. I think now the movement has become strong enough to transform the software business. I do not dare predict how it will transform it but I think it will be good.
During the US election campaign in 2008 i think I overheard a statement made by John McCain , when he started to realize he was not winning the election: The man (Barack Obama) is a movement. You can't stop a movement.
BTW: This weekend I will do practice som freedom of speech here: http://twitter.com/OfficalWRC
Håkonsen is reknown for boycotting the IOC and FIS and olympic qualification for halfpipe when it was introduced in the omlympics. Stallman is so reknowned for his controversery that a lot of people thinks he is just a childish troublemaker.
The reason these movements have become so powerful, even in a commercial sense, is that they consists of large crowds of people. They have to some varying degrees developed ethics and morale, and those not conforming are effectively kind of excluded or frozen out. The crowds is not driven by commercial interests, but it would be false to state that is not commercial interests involved. Snowboarding is not for economically faint hearted, and software development is seldom gratis.
An example showing the power of the Open Source movement: Try to imagine the WWW without the Apache Http Server. It is undeniable the very reason the acronym http is known probably by half or more of the world population. It has lost "market shares", but it is the Apache http Server that has made the widespread deployment of the WWW possible. It has alwasy been on the frontiers of the WWW, and I guess it still is. In addition most application servers has an Apache http Server in front of them to handle caching and serving static content and many other tasks. I think the success for Linux in the server room is largely because of Apache http Server. The Apache Foundation has long been sponsored by IBM.
The Open Source movement has laid a foundation for business, information spreading and social interaction over the internet that would not have taken place or would have looked completely different without it. In fact, I think Open Source has been genuinely good for the internet and computing in general, lowering the bar for adoption. It makes it possible for everyone the freedom of speach if they want to.
Open Source is again showing it's strength in times where financial crisis otherwise might have strangled innovation. Instead innovation on the internet is flourishing, largely powered by Open Source. I think now the movement has become strong enough to transform the software business. I do not dare predict how it will transform it but I think it will be good.
During the US election campaign in 2008 i think I overheard a statement made by John McCain , when he started to realize he was not winning the election: The man (Barack Obama) is a movement. You can't stop a movement.
BTW: This weekend I will do practice som freedom of speech here: http://twitter.com/OfficalWRC
Thursday, January 15, 2009
The Economy and Innovation
Nowadays a lot of things seems to happen that will influence on enterprises and individuals. The economy takes unpredictable turns, and innovation may suffer from capital starvation because more restrictive and careful financial investment policies.
Innovation inevitably comes with risk, and a lot of investors will be much more careful in respect to if and where they place their money. Careful investors may perform a much more thorough investigation of potential investments on beforehand than before.
My guess is that projects that has a solid innovation model, based on Enterprise Web 2.0, will have an advantage. This innovation model should include collaboration from all stakeholders, including its users. What this means to each and every project will vary, and Enterprise Web 2.0 must be adapted to the target organization(s) and individuals and vice versa.
Open Innovation can be seen as Enterprise Web 2.0 in an innovation context. Open Innovation recognizes that it is not affordable or rational that enterprises invents products solely from it's own research. Knowledge is distributed and must be gathered into collaboration.
I think Open Innovation can be taken one step further fully utilizing Web 2.0 software, with Social Media and Wikinomics to enable Mass Collaboration at a large scale. A popular term for this is Crowdsourcing.
Enterprise Web 2.0 connects knowledgeable people in new ways through social media, and collaboration through wikis is far more effective than email. Wikis is there for every interested person to read and contribute, and is not limited to mailing list. Further everyone is informed at the same time, at least all those subscribing to feeds from the wiki.
The community that arises around an idea or project will be a part of the backing capital, that nurtures it with capital, energy and direction. When there are several strong (economical or knowledgable) stakeholders involved, risk is spread.
So how can a software development enterprise start thriving from Open Innovation? Guess there will be no easy answer for that. In general I think it will be good to start in the small, opening up extension points that business partners can be interested in collaborating and provide value added services. Discussions and documentation must be located at a wiki, and people should be able to get acquainted with each other through some social media.
Opening up extension points in a software product, clearly puts some requirements on its architecture. To begin with, explore microformats and authentication solutions like OpenId, then consider if other formats must be invented.
I have established a Google Site, a subsite of my employer Webstep's site, for this subject. Please read more at http://sites.google.com/a/webstep.no/openinnovation/
Innovation inevitably comes with risk, and a lot of investors will be much more careful in respect to if and where they place their money. Careful investors may perform a much more thorough investigation of potential investments on beforehand than before.
My guess is that projects that has a solid innovation model, based on Enterprise Web 2.0, will have an advantage. This innovation model should include collaboration from all stakeholders, including its users. What this means to each and every project will vary, and Enterprise Web 2.0 must be adapted to the target organization(s) and individuals and vice versa.
Open Innovation can be seen as Enterprise Web 2.0 in an innovation context. Open Innovation recognizes that it is not affordable or rational that enterprises invents products solely from it's own research. Knowledge is distributed and must be gathered into collaboration.
I think Open Innovation can be taken one step further fully utilizing Web 2.0 software, with Social Media and Wikinomics to enable Mass Collaboration at a large scale. A popular term for this is Crowdsourcing.
Enterprise Web 2.0 connects knowledgeable people in new ways through social media, and collaboration through wikis is far more effective than email. Wikis is there for every interested person to read and contribute, and is not limited to mailing list. Further everyone is informed at the same time, at least all those subscribing to feeds from the wiki.
The community that arises around an idea or project will be a part of the backing capital, that nurtures it with capital, energy and direction. When there are several strong (economical or knowledgable) stakeholders involved, risk is spread.
So how can a software development enterprise start thriving from Open Innovation? Guess there will be no easy answer for that. In general I think it will be good to start in the small, opening up extension points that business partners can be interested in collaborating and provide value added services. Discussions and documentation must be located at a wiki, and people should be able to get acquainted with each other through some social media.
Opening up extension points in a software product, clearly puts some requirements on its architecture. To begin with, explore microformats and authentication solutions like OpenId, then consider if other formats must be invented.
I have established a Google Site, a subsite of my employer Webstep's site, for this subject. Please read more at http://sites.google.com/a/webstep.no/openinnovation/
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