The JP Allen Blog

I’ll be presenting my short paper on “Three Strategies for Open Source Deployment:  Substitution, Innovation, and Knowledge Reuse” at the Open Source Systems 2010 conference this May.

I wrote the paper because I see a number of organizations (including my own dear University) using what I call a substitution strategy for open source:  rip out existing proprietary software, and replace it with a ‘free’ open source equivalent.  That strategy has advantages, but it ignores many of the unique benefits of open source use.  I classify these unique advantages into two types:  an increased rate of innovation inside organizations (innovation), and an increased rate of innovation sharing between organizations (knowledge reuse).

In certain situations, such as my San Francisco local government study, I’d argue that the smarter open source strategy would be innovation, not substitution.  Focus your open source efforts on new deployments for unmet organizational needs, and let them grow.  Don’t spend all your time trying to replace existing proprietary software that ‘works’.

My paper on how Web 2.0 sites deal with ‘bad’ behavior will be the lead article in the Spring 2010 issue of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.  (Fear not, accreditation freaks!  Despite the ‘magazine’ name, it’s a peer-reviewed article.)

The editors gave it a new title:  “Knowledge-Sharing Successes in Web 2.0 Communities”.  The updated title better reflects my argument that the field of ‘Knowledge Management’ can, and should, learn from Web 2.0 communities how to get people to share more knowledge.

So put away those knowledge lifecycle diagrams and action plans, and start copying shamelessly from the masters at Craigslist, Wikipedia, Yelp, PlentyOfFish, Digg, and, heaven forbid, Facebook.

When I started creating my new ‘Papers‘ page, I had a dream of making all my academic work easily accessible–a ‘live CV’ with each paper just one click away.  I didn’t realize how much of my life’s work is locked inside publisher databases.

Out of 39 papers, I was able to link to the actual, published paper on the web twice.  I found links to early drafts or versions of the paper in five other cases.  Google Books has part or all of four other publications, and a copy of another paper in its cache.  The rest are either paid access only, or don’t exist as far as the web is concerned.  Prices ranged from $20 to $43 US per article.

Not only is some kind of open access the ‘right thing to do’, it helps work get cited more often–from 45 to 500% more often, according to MIT’s open access policy FAQ.  I’ll be proposing that USF adopt a similar open access policy for scholarly works and course syllabi, with the ability to opt-out no questions asked.  But it’s important for the default to be open, as the NIH found out when they started their open access policy in 2008.  Sharing shot up from 4 to about 60%.

I do love the citations feature on Google Scholar though, and I’ve added that to the page.  It’s a lifesaver for those of us without ISI/Web of Knowledge access.

The dynamic team of Steve Sawyer, Julie Rennecker, and myself pulled off another successful meeting of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 9.1, immediately after the ICIS 2009 conference in Phoenix. We went for a conversational format in small groups, rather than a barrage of presentations, and the participants agreed it was a winner.

You can see the high quality line-up of speakers and abstracts at our workshop website, available here.  (If anyone wants to know the pros and cons of building with Google Sites, I have some opinions…)

Looks like we’ll go for another post-ICIS workshop in St. Louis next year.

Nice job, Dons!  We made the list of Top 10 universities nationwide for Fulbright Scholars in 2009-10.  The occasion provided USF with another excuse to post a stunning JP Allen photo on the newly designed website.

My upcoming faculty exchange to the Azores starts in April.

I gave a talk today at the AIS Special Interest Group on Education conference on a new way of introducing business students to Information Systems.  Like many others, I argue that the traditional “Intro to Management Information Systems” course is passive, boring, usually out of date, and drives business students away from tech-oriented careers.  Instead of focusing on databases, or building toy web pages, our approach is to have students launch digital products or services using their own domain name (like jpedia.org), low-cost web hosting, open source software, and freely available web services.  Students are able to do serious stuff themselves, rather than just read about how wonderful it all is, even if they have no previous tech experience.  I’ve written about these ‘digital business’ or ‘internet business applications’ classes a bunch of times before on this blog.

After the enthusiastic reception I received at the AIS SIG-ED meeting, it’s clear to me that many profs in the field agree that customer relationships and analytics (real-time information on customers) are a new tech ‘gold mine’ for business.  While Information Systems knowledge is clearly needed to understand and manage information resources (our traditional ‘bread and butter’), and is increasingly needed to manage processes, the shift towards digitizing products, services, and the customer relationship itself is injecting technology even deeper into every business.  ‘Digital business’ is a great place for newly graduating students to develop skills that will allow them to make a unique contribution to organizations right away.

Slides from my Digital Business talk at AIS SIG-ED are available here.

I was able to visit two more fascinating universities on the Allen World Tour:  the Department of Information Systems in the Faculty of Commerce, University of Cape Town (UCT); and the Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics at the School of Information Technology, Monash University.

At UCT, not only was I able to meet with some of Mark Shuttleworth’s professors, but also ran a session of their Master’s degree seminar.  Most of the student projects were focused on adoption issues in South Africa.  I hope to do some future work with their team on open source adoption.

At Monash, I spent a month as a visiting researcher.  I was interested to learn that the organizational and social informatics group was not only going strong, but in fact had healthier student numbers than any other area of the IT school.  Their group was strong in health care, government, and community informatics.

Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher did a nice writeup on our Kraków, Poland presentation.  Hopefully, the momentum will continue to build for Kraków as a technology hub in Central and Eastern Europe.

As always, the Kraków slides are freely available online.

In other news, the online directory of Kraków IT companies started by Ramon Tancinco and myself is now available to the public.  Incomplete as it is, it gives you a feel for how much is going on in Kraków.

Update on the open source ‘miracle’ paper:  It has been accepted at the HICSS 2010 conference track on Open Movements:  FLOSS, Open Content, Open Access and Open Communities.  The paper now features the more sedate title “Open Source Deployment at the City and County of San Francisco:  From Cost Reduction to Rapid Innovation”.  The reviewers were enthusiastic, but still a bit skeptical that open source really could deliver such rapid innovation, and customer delight, under very challenging circumstances.  Hopefully other researchers will take up the challenge to help prove me right (or wrong).

A version of the open source innovation paper is available here, but the copyright now belongs to the IEEE.  Let’s hope they use it wisely.

After spending July in Krakow, Poland visiting companies, startups, and universities, I am truly impressed with the Krakow tech scene.

Together with a colleague at Cisco Systems Poland, Ramon Tancinco, I have put together a small deck of slides introducing Krakow as a hub for taking advantage of the immense pool of technical talent in Central and Eastern Europe.  Krakow has it all:  low cost, a nice place to live or visit, an emerging culture of entrepreneurship and risk-taking, plus the political and legal stability of an EU country.  Learn why Google, IBM, CapGemini and many others have chosen Krakow as a high-tech location.

We created these slides in the context of the new San Francisco/Krakow sister city relationship.  The slides are licensed as open content, so help yourself.

[Slides in ppt format]  New version as of 27 January 2010.