Author: JP

Thinking about opensource and VRM

For many years I’ve been of the belief that:

  • when a problem is generic look to the opensource community for the solution
  • when a problem is specific to a vertical market look to the commercial community
  • when a problem is unique to your organisation look to your own developers

You don’t have to be legalistic about it, this is just a rule of thumb and, at least to my warped mind, represents common sense.

The way I’ve phrased it, I may give the impression that the opensource community is incapable of solving vertical market problems. That is not the case. “Generic” is in the eye of the beholder: if there is sufficient scale then the opensource community will respond. It is the scale rather than the vertical-market-ness that determines this response.

Take a look at OpenMRS: a community-developed, open-source, enterprise electronic medical record system framework. It is based on Java, Hibernate, Tomcat, MySQL and XML, and runs via a browser.

OpenMRS is not unique. As far as I can make out, the Collaborative Software Initiative, which I first heard of via Dana Blankenhorn, was founded precisely to build vertical market apps and stacks in environments where the scale was attractive.

It is now a frightening five years since we started talking about “the missing opensource projects“. It is over four years since R0ml Lefkowitz gave his seminal presentation at OSBC 2004. Opensource is gently moving up the stack; gently being the operative word.

I cannot help but think that there is a direct and important correlation between this movement of opensource up the stack and the mushrooming of VRM. The VRM movement needs leverage, and this leverage cannot come from the existing “vendor” community. Of course there are enlightened people within the vendor community, and it is not my intention to disparage them. But you can’t break wind against thunder and expect an equitable outcome.

There is hope yet. The opensource community is moving up the stack, from generic to large-scale vertical. The VRM movement is gathering pace and momentum. Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of overlap between the two “communities”, if you can call them that. There is a difference, though; opensource is in well-established technical execution, while VRM is still moving through the amorphous concept-wrangling stage.

For VRM to get to full-speed-ahead execution, something else needs to happen. And I think that something else is the “verticalisation” of opensource. The good news is that it’s begun to happen.

Views?

This is the internet

Sean Tevis. Information architect. Decided to “retire” his current State Representative. He’s going to win. This is his story (XKCD homage style) so far. Running for State Representative in Kansas. Read the whole story here. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the internet.

Thanks to Phil and FND for tipping me off.

OSSification

Sitting comfortably? Take a look at this excerpt from what appears to be a manual written maybe sixty years ago:

Do you identify with any of it? Recognise those behaviours from anywhere?

Stay seated. Now take a look at the cover page of the manual in question:

Yup. Simple sabotage, as practised and trained for by the OSS. Yes, folks, many large enterprises have been OSSified. Of course it’s not happening in your organisation, or in mine. Of course you don’t recognise any of those behaviours. Of course the shoe’s on the other foot.

And of course that shoe’s made of wood.

My thanks to Sean for pointing this out, for transporting me to Euan’s post before I’d got to it in my feed reader. [And thanks as well to Michael Walsh for sending the link to Euan in the first place.]

I’ve taken a long hard look at the manual in question. Looks genuine. Take a look for yourself, Euan links to it. If it does turn out to be a forgery, in these days of Photoshop, at least it’s a good one.

Edgy comments

Some weeks ago, while in the US, I could not resist buying the latest Atlantic Monthly, seeing that Nicholas Carr had written a piece headlined “Is Google making us stupid?”

Incidentally, for some strange reason, the magazine insisted on spelling “stupid” as “stoopid” on the cover, ostensibly to play off the word “google”, but then went back to the normal spelling for the headline of the article itself. Weird. I couldn’t see the point.

But that’s not relevant. What is relevant is Carr’s article, which I read and liked even though I disagreed with a good deal of it. More on that later. That’s not what this post is about.

What this post is about is the responses to Carr’s article in the latest issue of The Edge. More particularly, it’s about an unusually rich crop of pithy statements included in those responses. Here are some samples:

W. Daniel Hillis: While we complain about the overload, we sign up for faster internet service, in-pocket email, unlimited talk-time and premium cable. In the mist of the flood, we are turning on all the taps.

Kevin Kelly: I think that even if the penalty is that you lose 20 points of your natural IQ when you get off Google AI, most of us will choose to keep the 40 IQ points we gain by jacking in all the time.

Larry Sanger: Carr profoundly misunderstands the nature of the problem: to pretend that you can blame others (programmers, no less!) for your unwillingness to think long and hard is only a sign of how the problem itself resides within you. It is ultimately a problem of will, a failure to choose to think. If that is a problem of yours, you have no one to blame for it but yourself.

George Dyson: Nicholas Carr asks a question that all of us should be asking ourselves:

“What if the cost of machines that think is people who don’t?”

It’s a risk. “The ancestors of oysters and barnacles had heads. Snakes have lost their limbs and ostriches and penguins their power of flight. Man may just as easily lose his intelligence,” warned J. B. S. Haldane in 1928.

We will certainly lose some treasured ways of thinking but the next generation will replace them with something new. The present generation has no childhood immunity to web-based stupidity but future generations will.

I am more worried by people growing up unable to tie a bowline, sharpen a hunting knife, or rebuild a carburetor than I am by people who don’t read books. Perhaps books will end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries (or the depths of Google) and read by a select few.

We are here (on Edge) because people are still reading books. The iPod and the MP3 spelled the decline of the album and the rise of the playlist. But more people are listening to more music, and that is good.

Jaron Lanier:

The thing that is making us stupid is pretending that technological change is an autonomous process that will proceed in its chosen direction independently of us.

It is certainly true that particular technologies can make you stupid. Casinos, dive bars, celebrity tabloids, crack cocaine…

And certainly there are digital technologies that don’t bring out the best or brightest aspects of human nature. Anonymous comments are an example.

There are many others. It is worth your reading the original article by Carr and the rejoinders in the Edge.

A sideways look at IT and IS strategy and VRM

I’ve been reading quite a bit of Umair Haque this past year. He makes me think. Take his latest post, Saving Strategy from the Strategists. You don’t have to agree with everything he says, but the following excerpt shows where his head’s at:

Perhaps the meaning of competitive advantage, when all the games have been played and the gears of the economic machine have finally stopped moving, is this: privatize benefits and socialize costs.

That might have been sustainable in a disconnected, asset-heavy industrial economy. But it cannot hold in a hyperconnected edgeconomy. When all of us can trade ten billion times a day, if everyone’s simply trying to claim benefits from everyone else, while shifting costs and risks to everyone else, the result is economic implosion.

In an edgeconomy, chasing competitive advantage is like playing a game of economic musical chairs – one where you leave a grenade on your chair every time the music starts up again. Sooner or later, everyone gets blown up.

The problem is simple. As we’re finding out the hard way – yesterday’s approaches to strategy simply cannot power the economies or businesses of the 21st century.

So the question is: how do we save strategy?

Umair then goes on to make the following points while looking at how market participants, acting “strategically” can cause serious implosion:

  • Strategy isn’t arbitrage
  • Strategy isn’t dealmaking
  • Strategy isn’t an arms race
  • Strategy is about long-term “best interests” of all stakeholders

Now that’s a ridiculously short summary because I would prefer you to read the real thing rather than any attempt at summary from me.

But in the meantime. I started mulling over what would happen if I transplanted what he was saying to a different context, IS and IT strategy. And , in trying to paraphrase while transplanting, this is what I came up with:

1. IS/IT strategy isn’t arbitrage: Don’t build applications that do nothing but “capture value” from other existing applications in your environment. Those applications are embedded within existing people and processes. Organisational immune systems will therefore kick in and push back against the value migration. Instead, build applications that create demonstrable new value; “old value” will migrate of its own accord as adoption takes place.

2. IS/IT strategy isn’t dealmaking: We’ve spent decades insisting on trying to build applications that seek to share costs between business units. Like bad deals, what tends to happen is that the “shared” piece grows bigger and bigger, until it overbalances and crashes down under its own weight and volition. As Umair says, we have to concentrate on how our resources and competencies will fit together tomorrow, not just how to share costs today. We have to move the debate from “business unit” views to those of competencies and capabilities.

3. IS/IT strategy isn’t an arms race: We have to make architectural choices that lead to sustainable differences, not just cost leadership in a me-too environment. One could argue that the reason why we keep having dominant players in the IS/IT vendor world is because we insist on this me-too-ness. Nobody got fired for buying IBM. Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft. Nobody got fired for buying Google. Whatever. Nobody got fired full stop.

Which leads me on to VRM.

Too often enterprises walk down the “arms race” aisle, consummating Stockholm-syndrome marriages. That’s not sustainable any more, at the very least because we keep creating systemic risks and monoculture weaknesses across entire market sectors as a result.

If we want to create sustainable differences within a market sector, we’re going to need to work with other market participants, work more closely with other market participants. Sometimes, when I look at what tends to happen, the only analogy that comes to mind is this: Market participants are like people living in the same neighbourhood. The lock-in vendors of old are like burglars in the neighbourhood. And what we’ve been doing is, rather than creating neighbourhood watch schemes, we’ve been trying to negotiate individually and bilaterally with the burglars. With predictable results.

I’m sad not to be able to go to the VRM workshops taking place right now. If you want to participate vicariously, like I am, check out vrm08 at twitter. Better still, start with this article by Doc and this one by Adriana.