CollabWorks

Collaboration Event

Our next Open IT Forum is on April 3rd, in San Carlos, California

We're having the event at Piacere Ristorante  at 727 Laurel Street, San Carlos, CA 94070-3113

If you are interested in attending, please RSVP here.

I wanted to tell you a little bit more about our speakers we have lined up. We've talked a bit about what "Going Green" might mean, and we have two experts with interesting perspectives: Vladimir Mioushev of 3Tera, and Joel Makower of GreenBiz.com.

Vladimir Mioushev, President and CEO of 3Tera
www.3tera.com

Ask several IT professionals to define virtualization and you might get as many definitions as people you ask. In this case, we're asking Vlad Mioushev, who is approaching virtualization from the point of view of a grid. While traditionally grid technology has been reserved for super-computing number-crunching activities such as weather forecasting or protein-folding simulations, Vladimir has made this technology available to transactional web-applications.

Find out more what this technology means for IT organizations from a management and deployment point of view, and how other CIOs are using it.

PS. 3Tera's AppLogic was just named 2007 Category Breaker by Network World Magazine

Joel Makower, Founder of GreenBiz.com
www.makower.com

Green is red-hot! We are very fortunate to have "the guru of green business practices" as a speaker. Joel will share his perspectives on how CIOs can not only be environmentally friendly, but at the same time, put more green in a company's coffers. Joel has been speaking for 20 years about sustainable business practices. He has worked with a wide range of major companies on corporate environmental strategy and practices -- including Gap, General Electric, General Motors, Hewlett Packard, Levi Strauss, Nike, and Procter & Gamble -- as well as with more than a dozen early-stage companies focusing on environmentally sustainable products and services. Joel will also give examples of collaboration between companies that are saving money and the planet at the same time.

Collaboration Environments

One of the challenges of facilitating Open IT projects was the selection of proper collaboration software. There has been an explosion of Web 2.0-style collaboration systems and selecting the appropriate tools for Open IT Works took a focused set of requirements and a lot of experimentation. We got some invaluable help from Ismael Ghalimi, CEO of Intalio, and one of the advisors to Open IT Works.

We had a number of unique requirements to deal with. Our users include enterprise CIOs, people who are unlikely to spend a lot of time at a web-based user interface themselves, but also developers and managers who needed a rich set of project management features for developing new intellectual property on a collaborative basis. For the CIOs, our requirements were that the interfaces had to be easy to use and they had to have rich connections through e-mail; we knew the CIOs would prefer to see project status and announcements, and to deal with action items and milestones, as part of their daily e-mail stream. For everyone else, we wanted an intuitive, powerful interface that included document management, collaborative editing of simple documents in the Wiki style, discussion forums, customization for our company look and feel, and project management features such as tasks, milestones, and calendars. It had to be economical for a startup company with a growing number of users. And since we are big advocates of the Software as a Service (SaaS) trend, we wanted to engage a fully hosted service, not build or operate it ourselves. 

We found that the tools in this space are divided into broad categories: online replacements for Microsoft Office features (Desktop 2.0); Wikis; IM-based; more traditional (and quite powerful) project management packages. We investigated about 30 different products or services. Some of the more interesting hosted services included: Atlassian, Celoxis, Foldera, Intensil Wikiflow, Zimbra, and Zoho Virtual Office. But we finally selected Central Desktop, which includes all of the features we wanted at a reasonable price. It has the strength of intuitive integration with e-mail, Wiki-style document collaboration (although they use HTML instead of one of the more traditional styles of Wiki source code underneath the GUI), document management, and simple project management features. We are using the system only for private-access member collaboration at the moment, but it has the capability of fully public Wiki interaction, which we may take advantage of in the future. I have been impressed with the responsiveness of Central Desktop support and their rapid implementation of new features. 

There are many other factors to consider in providing useful facilitation of collaborative projects, beyond the selection of an online service. I will be exploring some of those factors in future postings. If you have any comments about these online services, however, I'd love to start a dialogue with you, using the comments at the bottom of the blog.

Welcome to Open IT

It is my pleasure to welcome you to the Open IT Works blog where I, Mike Takamoto, Hal Jespersen, our thought leaders and advisers, and our CIO members will share our thoughts with you and welcome your comments. Several of us will post as least once per month. We hope you find the dialog informative and provocative.
   
We started Open IT Works to solve two related problems—duplicative problem solving and a huge lack of truly innovative IT projects. Most would agree that 80% of the problems solved by one IT organization are solved others. This duplication is a waste. It benefits only vendors and consultants and also leads to talk about why CIOs are needed—Why not simply outsource IT? The concept of Open IT will reduce duplicative problem solving by making it easy for IT organizations to collaborate on shared problems. The goal is to save maintenance costs and plow those resources into innovative projects that can really make a difference for the business.
   
When I spoke last week with Henry Chesbrough, Cal Berkeley professor and author of Open Innovations, he applauded our efforts as an example of an Open Business Model (his new book title). Our collaborative model leverages the resources and skill strengths of our members as they solve problems via defined projects. The value chain includes both users and vendors and the more that participate the better it gets for all the participants. Remember Metcalfe's Law, or the Network Effect?
   
After listening to Tony Perkins at the Open Source Think Tank last week, I believe Open IT Works is an early adopter example of what he calls the Enterprise 2.0 model. Anything called 2.0 is doomed to hype, VC bubbles, and selling media and events. But it also can identify the next disruptive model. Enterprise 2.0 is not just blogging, Wikis, and Ajax-driven web experiences. It is a change in behavior from strict hierarchies and predefined processes to more free-flowing collaboration with trusted sources. Users, not suppliers, will dominate Enterprise 2.0. Business models that rapidly adapt to shift value chains (supplier-channel/community-users) and more efficiently leverage these value chains will win over traditional niche and differentiating models. Whether it be Moore's Law or Metcalfe's Law, it is all about leverage. More for less. Faster and better. Welcome to our Open IT world.