To centralize or decentralize, that is the question...

I found the following article by Kevin Crowston and James Howiston about the Social Structure of Free and Open Source Software. It explores the implications of measurable communication patterns on the assertions of the Cathedral and the Bazaar metaphor, namely that highly decentralized and somewhat chaotic social structures are capable of creating higher quality and more generally useful products than traditional closed projects that focus on creating competitive advantage through protecting intellectual property. This is a crude definition so I highly recommend following the link above.

Crowston and Howiston examine data associated with bug tracking on a variety of open source projects and develop a methodology for measuring the degree of decentralization of a given project. Some of their conclusions are very very fascinating and made me think.

In The Wisdom of Crowds and Wikinomics the concepts around mass collaboration, ala Linux and the Cathedral/Bazaar metaphor, are explored and the potential benefits of these models are sorted and categorized. This is giving rise to some interesting conversations about organizational operating models and competitive advantage via collaboration. There is the potential here for lots of c-level executives to hop on a very popular but tricky bandwagon. Like everything else the trick is in the execution.

How many companies have adopted the tenets of process engineering or continuous improvement through six-sigma and lean techniques? Many of these companies are seeing the benefits of these tools and methods but they don't really translate to a competitive advantage because their competition deploy them as well. Like these tools mass collaboration, and it's enabling technology, is likely to become a necessary standard of operation rather than a revolutionary competitive differentiator with a few exceptions. As with all things that comprise the standard book of operating principles and tricks execution will be the real test and therein lies the trap.

The real lesson of Crowston and Howiston is that mass collaboration is not a well defined thing with clear boundaries and a cookbook for success. It's an enabler for truly inspirational and robust organizations. If the apple is rotten at the core then you're only enabling more rapid decay. If the apple is strong and fresh then you're getting ready to bake a mighty good pie. The core of any good organization is it's people.

So beware the seduction of techniques, tools and processes that claim to be the key to competitive advantage and cookbook success. Just like late night infomercials it's snake oil. Instead look to your people and the rest will come. In their minds, voices and inspiration lies the real wisdom, centralized or decentralized.

Barcelona, Email and Opportunity

I'm back from vacation. Barcelona is a very cool city! The food, people, art and architecture are all a wonderful experience. We also stayed in Cadaques, a small coastal town in northeast Spain that still has a small working fishing fleet and also mostly caters to tourists. The quiet and peace were a stark contract to busy Barcelona! We also spent the night under Montserrat in Montistrol de Montserrat, a small village under the steep mountain atop which a monastery was built long ago. Montistrol was a taste of typical Catalan village life with people walking their dogs, a horse drawn cart still in use, pick-up games at the village football pitch and a cafe/bar in the town center that is filled to the gills after 7PM on a Thursday night. I loved Catalonia.

Now I'm back, refreshed and relaxed and cranking through several hundred emails. My task list is brimming with new assignments received while I was away. Fortunately I'm blessed with a wonderful team of folks who can tackle nearly anything that comes their way. Currently one of my team members is out of office preparing to have her second baby. There are three interim managers, one from one of her teams, our manager of systems architecture and another from an applications team, who are filling in. All of them are doing a great job and the opportunity to bring a different point of view to some of the challenges we face has been enlightening. We wish our colleague a happy and healthy birth and look forward to her return.

Many of the new assignments have related to the financial situation faced by so many people around the world. As we collaborate with our executive leadership to ensure the future of our ministry the challenges that we face occasionally feel daunting. Every challenge hides an opportunity however.

Our endeavors to improve the quality of our development application portfolio will now naturally align and be pulled along by the mandate that more scrutiny is applied to projects that do not fall into the purview of IT Governance. This will result in more opportunities to collaborate with our customers and ultimately optimize the value that our web development squad provides to the ministry. The need to report out and improve patient care quality measures will help drive a shift and transition away from old school operational reporting towards the delivery of pro-active data that allows hospital staff to step away from data-entry and spend more time on improving outcomes. The necessary slowdown of operational budget growth will reduce the overall number of discretionary projects on our plate during a period where we have at least four major infrastructure and application upgrade initiatives that are key to preventing the decay of our production environment. The need for great ideas to reduce overhead and generate revenue will provide opportunities to pilot and roll out low cost/high yield idea generation and implementation techniques that will provide scores of opportunities for long term incremental improvements in efficiency.

The list goes on and on. In times like this I reflect on the amazingly talented colleagues I work with each day and my anxiety evaporates because I know we will weather the storm and emerge stronger than ever.