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’.

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.

In partnership with the Department of Technology at the City and County of San Francisco, I’ve been studying the deployment of new applications using open source.  We looked at three projects (including the recoverysf.org site), and found the people involved reporting results that seemed almost too good to be true:  working systems developed and deployed in record time, at very little cost, that increase the skills and importance of locally-employed IT talent.  It seems like an ‘IS miracle’, especially in these tough times.

While cost-cutting is often seen as the big selling point for open source, faster ‘time-to-market’ for new applications is the focus of our results.  To quote one of our respondents:

“Now, you can stand up that site in 8 hours, four hours, have it done by the
end of the day.  It flips the customer out.  Really?  I thought it would take 2
months.  Being responsive is huge.  Technology changes fast, but business
requirements change faster.”

For example, there’s no way the recoverysf.org site would have been built in less than three weeks without using an open source platform (WordPress), and without a new technology mindset.  It’s a mindset where the IT department sees itself as offering great new products for its diverse customers, rather than trying to control and constrain them all the time.

The paper with our preliminary research results is currently under review.  Please contact me if you’d like a draft.  Special thanks to the City’s CTO Blair Adams, USF MBA Dave Geller, and all of the study participants.

It’s official. I’ve been named a Fulbright scholar during my 2009-10 sabbatical year.  The host country will be Portugal, specifically the Azores islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

At the University of the Azores, I will be a visiting lecturer in Innovation and Technology Management.  I’ll be teaching an MBA class during their third term (April-June 2010), meeting with students, and consulting on curriculum.

The Fulbright scholars program is the “flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government”, sending about 800 U.S. faculty and professionals abroad each year.  To fulfill my mission of “increasing mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries”, I am prepared to eat do whatever it takes to promote international harmony.

Tech is back, people.  Two huge reasons:

• Tech is still innovating big-time.  Thanks to innovation, tech-centric industries (software, networks, online, services), and closely related industries (electronics, telcos, digital media, entertainment, gaming, tech consulting), are going strong in tough economic times. We’re the ‘real’ economy now!
• Hardcore tech is easier to access than ever.  It’s never been easier to move beyond being just a ‘user’ by actually customizing, assembling, and developing your very own apps and services.

In an effort to capture the excitement of this new era, we have launched the non-award-winning “You belong in tech” ad campaign to get students fired up.  The campaign only consists of an eight slide presentation, but each slide is extremely high impact.

We have also launched the Campaign for Real Tech (CRT), which consists entirely of this blog post.  CRT believes that a business school education in San Francisco deserves serious tech coverage. Students, if you want to learn more about any of these topics, leave a comment on this page, or grab your nearest b-school administrator:

social media, social technologies, online communities, tech product management, tech marketing and sales, web 2.0, open source, open innovation, enterprise architectures, web analytics, web apps, e-commerce (yes, it’s back), content management, customer relationship management, APIs and platforms, search engine placement, online ads, online experience management, usability, virtual worlds, mobility, location-based services, sensor tech, or enterprise 2.0

If you want to change the world, this is the time.

The newly-released book Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion looks at how positive visions of the future convince people to invest in, adopt, and use new technologies. For many emerging technologies, rational arguments and financials aren’t enough, because of the uncertainty. At some point, there has to be a leap of faith. But how does this leap of faith happen?

My chapter, “Visions of the Next Big Thing: Computerization Movements and the Mobilization of Support for New Technologies,” is a study of more than 2,500 articles published over a 10 year period, to see how companies in the once-hot Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) space convinced themselves to make big investments in the technology.

Through arguments with colorful names such as new mass markets, killer features, inevitable progressions, bundling together, and the ever-popular horse race, 34 of the leading companies in computing, telecom, and consumer electronics convinced themselves to make major PDA investments, though most were soon abandoned. When success didn’t materialize as quickly as they hoped, they used variants of these arguments to rationalize their failures.

The chapter includes two short case studies of companies that were able to successfully resist the prevailing rhetoric of the day, and how they did it. The British PDA maker Psion managed to resist the craze for ‘pen-based computing’, while the American company Palm resisted the conventional wisdom of phone-based ‘communicator’ PDAs with their own vision of a ‘connected organizer’.

(Added 6/23/08)  A nice review of the book here that mentions the chapter.

Why the obsession with Macworld? The iPhone is hot, of course, and Macs are great machines. Steve Jobs is the 21st century genius of tech marketing. But there has to be something more fundamental to explain how Macworld can simultaneously overshadow the entire consumer electronics industry at CES, and the retirement of Bill Gates.

I think everyone’s crazy for Apple because people are desperate for consumer electronics innovation. Exciting, innovative, easy-to-use software was supposed to be the future of consumer electronics. But who else besides Apple is really delivering?

The Wall Street Journal argued a few years ago (”Power Switch”, 3/10/05; see my letter to the editor published in the WSJ here) that American companies were finally making headway in the Asian-dominated consumer electronics industry because of their superior software skills. They provided three examples: iPods, Kodak EasyShare cameras, and Palm organizers. Fast forward to 2008, and it looks like Apple is the only game in town.

The consumer electronics companies are giving us 150-inch plasma screens and screaming fast wireless routers, but where’s the software innovation? Which universities are providing the great ideas? Which venture firms will touch the consumer electronics space? Which companies are focusing on important consumer tasks, and making them easier from start to finish? People want iPhone or iPod-like design in their future, not the nightmarish menu system on my new big-screen monitor.

Corporate entrepreneurship is the idea that large corporations can overcome their “risk-averse cultures” that “stifle innovation” and learn how to “create, develop, and sustain innovative new businesses”.

I’ve prepared a new executive lecture session on the opportunities offered by new information technology for promoting corporate entrepreneurship, broken down into three categories:

• Collaboration through ’social computing’ – enabling people to find each other and not have to ‘reinvent the wheel’, let voices and ideas be heard, and allow people to describe and categorize knowledge in the way they find most useful.
• Analytics and business intelligence – finding ways to take advantage of the masses of data being collected by firms.
• ‘Mass collaboration’ with the outside world – linking to innovation capabilities outside of any one business.

But can mere technology make a difference? Conventional wisdom says that corporate culture and leadership ultimately determine whether businesses can become more innovative and entrepreneurial, and that technologies are just tools. I wonder. Maybe the technology itself, if it connects enough people together, can be the source of significant change. Let’s see what our visiting executives have to say.

The slides are available here. This session will be part of the USF Corporate Entrepreneurship Latin America program for the ADEN Business School of Argentina, rated as the top MBA program in Latin America by Latin Trade magazine. Thanks to my colleague Carlos Baradello for organizing the session.