Comment Re:Is Open Source Good for All of Our Members? (Score 1) 287
I totally disagree that Internal software is non-differentiating. In the age of the Internet where many companies are still looking for ways to take advantage of it to gain a competitive advantage (instead of just playing catch-up), I don't know how you could make such a blanket statement. Not only that, but aggressive adopters of new technology to run their businesses are often the most successful in their respective markets. Take WalMart for example.
Furthermore, that attitude almost guarantees that OSS will stay in the background because they will be chasing innovations brought about by others. Take some software that could be considered as somewhat non-differentiating - office suites. A lot of the push in the OSS world right now is to replace MS products with OSS, and they are doing so not by coming up with better designed software, but software that uses the same look-and-feel and file formats. Yes, the lower licensing cost is an advantage, but does it really do what software is supposed to do - make people more productive by giving them better access to relavent information? Taken in that light, the licensing cost and the availability of source code pales in comparison of the benefits of more proprietary, but easier to use and customize software. Good and easy to use customization capabilities (eg: scripting) built-into a product are far more valuable than the source code.
In fact, that very line of thinking is what can make software even more differentiating, because a competitor is certainly out there trying to come up with a system that will help him be more competitive. In other words, if the CIO of company 'A' says "I'll use OSS because it is "good enough" and cheaper. IT really doesn't differentiate us." and then the CIO of company 'B' takes the opposite approach and comes up with some killer BI application for the sales people that allows them to win the deal 80% of the time, well you certainly have a differentiator there. Or let's say that a CIO funds an effort to automate workflow based on Office Suite scripting and this allows them to process twice the number of special customer requests per day, thereby making even the Office Suite (the one with the best scripting capabilities) a differentiator.
What I'm doing right now is kind-of neat and I think may be a large part of the future of IT in this country. I'm (a 3rd party) part of a team automating business workflow processes for a large Fortune 500 company - but I'm not doing it for the IT dept., I'm doing it directly for the business group completely outside of IT influence (although we use IT infrastructure and work with IT in that regard). In this context, two huge issues of today have been kicked around:
1) Why not use OSS? Because the same quality of tools aren't there for what we are doing and it is far cheaper for us to license the tools than to re-invent the wheel by modifying OSS tools.
2) Why not offshore outsource? Because the size of the team would have to be increased to provide the business knowledge and business analyis and even then we couldn't guarantee the same software turn-around capabilities, thereby negating any price advantage and probably harming the quality and usefulness of the software. Also, the IT dept. does use offshore outsourcing... We recently had to integrate some of "our" software with "IT's" software, and they use foreign outsourcing. With the responsibiities (amount of customization) pretty much balanced, our estimate for the customization work was 40 hrs. and theirs was 240. And I suspect that their end of things will encounter more problems during the transition as well, because it involves more people of disparate organizations.
I think the "non-differentiating" argument is a big mistake, not only for OSS but vendors out there trying to make the same old processes cheaper, when they should be looking to innovation to make the processes better at supporting core businesses. In other words, we are in a race to the bottom right now, which does not support the potential value of IT to an organization.
Furthermore, that attitude almost guarantees that OSS will stay in the background because they will be chasing innovations brought about by others. Take some software that could be considered as somewhat non-differentiating - office suites. A lot of the push in the OSS world right now is to replace MS products with OSS, and they are doing so not by coming up with better designed software, but software that uses the same look-and-feel and file formats. Yes, the lower licensing cost is an advantage, but does it really do what software is supposed to do - make people more productive by giving them better access to relavent information? Taken in that light, the licensing cost and the availability of source code pales in comparison of the benefits of more proprietary, but easier to use and customize software. Good and easy to use customization capabilities (eg: scripting) built-into a product are far more valuable than the source code.
In fact, that very line of thinking is what can make software even more differentiating, because a competitor is certainly out there trying to come up with a system that will help him be more competitive. In other words, if the CIO of company 'A' says "I'll use OSS because it is "good enough" and cheaper. IT really doesn't differentiate us." and then the CIO of company 'B' takes the opposite approach and comes up with some killer BI application for the sales people that allows them to win the deal 80% of the time, well you certainly have a differentiator there. Or let's say that a CIO funds an effort to automate workflow based on Office Suite scripting and this allows them to process twice the number of special customer requests per day, thereby making even the Office Suite (the one with the best scripting capabilities) a differentiator.
What I'm doing right now is kind-of neat and I think may be a large part of the future of IT in this country. I'm (a 3rd party) part of a team automating business workflow processes for a large Fortune 500 company - but I'm not doing it for the IT dept., I'm doing it directly for the business group completely outside of IT influence (although we use IT infrastructure and work with IT in that regard). In this context, two huge issues of today have been kicked around:
1) Why not use OSS? Because the same quality of tools aren't there for what we are doing and it is far cheaper for us to license the tools than to re-invent the wheel by modifying OSS tools.
2) Why not offshore outsource? Because the size of the team would have to be increased to provide the business knowledge and business analyis and even then we couldn't guarantee the same software turn-around capabilities, thereby negating any price advantage and probably harming the quality and usefulness of the software. Also, the IT dept. does use offshore outsourcing... We recently had to integrate some of "our" software with "IT's" software, and they use foreign outsourcing. With the responsibiities (amount of customization) pretty much balanced, our estimate for the customization work was 40 hrs. and theirs was 240. And I suspect that their end of things will encounter more problems during the transition as well, because it involves more people of disparate organizations.
I think the "non-differentiating" argument is a big mistake, not only for OSS but vendors out there trying to make the same old processes cheaper, when they should be looking to innovation to make the processes better at supporting core businesses. In other words, we are in a race to the bottom right now, which does not support the potential value of IT to an organization.
