Commercial Considerations with Open Source Software

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Tonight was the night of my presentation to the IT Discussion Group for CPA Australia. It was a packed house – well, it would have been if it had actually been a house. And if there had been a few more people there.

Nonetheless, I’ll claim it was delivered to great acclaim. I promised that I would upload the slides from the presentation, so here they are in PDF form – “Pits, Traps, and Windfalls of Open Source Software“. I am happy to email the powerpoint (or OOo version) upon request.

As always, happy to have any feedback on the issues raised here.

Email Management and a Good Night’s Sleep

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I note (thanks Phillip Smith) a Hewlett Packard research item (reported at cnn.com) that indicates that emails and text messages create a greater loss in a person’s IQ than smoking marijuana. At least, that’s the headline – but the study also provides a comparison showing that being constantly interrupted by emails has the same impact on your IQ as missing a full night’s sleep.

The study doesn’t mention the long-term effects of email use, but one would think that the long-term “e-mail withdrawal” symptoms can’t be good.

I suspect banning email won’t be the answer for productivity increases (can you imagine receiving 120 phone calls a day instead?), but this is probably a reminder note to regularly schedule email-free time. If it is important, they’ll call you. I suspect many people suffer from the symptom that the next email could be really interesting (even if the last five weren’t).

I know I do, and if I find a good therapy group I’ll post it on this website.

IT Governance and Shareholder Value

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I note that the IT Governance Institute (it’s chaired by Tony Hayes, my predecessor as Chair of the ITM COE for CPA Australia) has released a “Guide to IT Value @ Risk”. The guide will be found here, while the IT Governance Institute can be found here.

IT Governance is about the way that the information technology business function is managed, particularly in the context of the board’s responsibilities. IT Governance is one of the major work programs of the Information Technology & Management Centre of Excellence for 2005.

Pits, Traps and Windfalls of Open Source Software (For Business)

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One of the things that I have often come across when consulting with clients is, obviously, the phenomenon of open-source software, and next week (17 May 2005) I will be presenting to the local CPA Australia IT discussion group on the topic of Pits, Traps and Windfalls of Open Source Software.

Now, I happen to think that open source software is better than the proverbial sliced bread on a picnic, but it does come with some real dangers hidden with its benefits. A real commercial issue is that, for software that is “free”, no purchase order is required and a business can find itself heavily reliant upon the open source software (and the skills of the person who knows how to use it) without any of the usual gatekeeper controls to ensure people understand what it’s all about (many businesses require a business case to purchase new software – but, no outlay means no business case means no commercial considerations are part of the decision).

And once you get out of the top five or ten open source projects in a particular software category, your ability to find someone that can actually use the software decreases markedly (which usually means that, once you find them, you’ve got to pay them quite well thanks very much). So fairly soon, and without any real red flags to indicate that it’s happening, the business can become very reliant upon the skills of one single solitary person (who may or may not be a good bloke, but is still susceptible to the all-too-common “hit by a bus” problem).

But, I use Open Office at home (fairly seamlessly for most documents) and we do sponsor open-source software such as DotNetNuke to our clients, as it’s a category killer in open source portal tools, and is based upon some standard technologies. I think it will always be interesting to run the numbers for clients and see which way they are better off. And this is exactly why I’m presenting next week on exactly this topic. So if you’re in the Brisbane area, please feel free to drop in and say “hi” by registering and perhaps discuss the finer points or two of this topic in the business context.

Information Systems In The Old School Yard

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In another life, I worked for independent schools (Anglican Church Grammar School and St Margaret’s Anglican Girls’ School), and in so doing I came to a good appreciation of what schools try to do with what they’ve got available (i.e. a lot with not much). In my post-school career, I have had occasion to visit schools and evaluate how the schools organise and run their information technology.

Each quarter my firm (BDO Kendalls) publishes a newsletter specifically to the education sector. In the autumn edition, I was asked to write an article entitled “Maximising Education Technology“, and so here it is, published in all its glory.

As always, feedback welcome.