Category Business

Conflicts Help Optimize Business Processes

Sandro Groganz 2 Comments

While reading Lean Solutions (thanks Judith!), I came across this paragraph:

And the one thing we can conclude for certain, based on our years of observing faulty processes, is that if you drop good people into a bad process you quickly end up with a lot of “bad” people assigning blame to each other.

I have experienced this phenomena of teams gone bad myself several times while being employed or working on the spot with customers and observing their corporate culture.

Here are some symptoms:

  • Political games or bullying kill creativity and the ability to concentrate
  • Others think about others that they are incompetent
  • … and truly incompetent people do not get fired
  • No one speaks the truth and real conflicts are being avoided
  • Emotions are being classified as unprofessional

It all comes down to a company not capable or interested in optimizing its processes, which is effectively the same as not respecting each employee’s motivation for doing a great job. This is where a lot of frustration erodes the company’s business potentials.

Japanese car producers have shown that tightly structured work processes are not the domain of Germans only :). Optimized processes are key to success. Monopolists can afford to be chaotic – but there will come the day where a competitor with much better processes will seriously attack the monopolist.

Breaking the spell of an inefficient work environment is actually simple, yet it starts with the behavior of each individual person in the company. Hence, it requires courage:

  • Speak for yourself, practice radical honesty, say how you feel
  • Don’t hold back just because others might not like what you are saying

Being good to yourself does not mean that you disrespect others or that you are a trouble maker. Quite the opposite, this is actually the best way how to show respect, because by being honest and straight forward, everyone else has the chance to react upon what you are saying (even if it means that you might realize you are wrong and act like an idiot – we are all human…).

Well, of course, if you realize that the company is still not good to you, then you’ll have to leave.

Once, each employee feels taken serious and is able to express himself, business issues instead of personal fights will regain attention. Only by clearly addressing conflicts, there’s a chance that business processes can be optimized. Conflict resolution is key to business process optimization and to support teams in striving for a common goal.

The Open Source Promise

Sandro Groganz 3 Comments

Panel I attended the panel discussion entitled “The Open Source Promise” at Red Herring Spring 2007 yesterday. Here are the aspects I found most interesting:

Marriage of SaaS and Open Source

Most of the panelists do a mixture of traditional Open Source model (software + services) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Seems like this becomes the mainstream business model for Open Source products that are useful for end users/consumers. At Mindquarry, we’ll offer a hosted solution of our Open Source product as well.

Ranga Rangachari (Groundwork Open Source) sees a general move away from the typical use of self-hosted Open Source software within enterprises towards SaaS.

Bill Soward (Adaptive Planning) described that there’s a successful path for lead generation from those who download and try out the freely available Open Source product and then simply buy a subscription for the SaaS offering to use it in production.

Bob Walters (Untangle) made a highly interesting general comment on the “marriage of Open Source and SaaS”: The central issue here is that e.g. a (the?) major SaaS provider, Google, made several great improvements to the Linux kernel but does not give them back to the community. Here, SaaS works against the community spirit of Open Source. GPL v3 is supposed to help avoid this issue.

Community is your main business

Bob Walters made a good point in saying if you miss attracting a developers community, you miss 75% of your business.

Linux will win the mobile market

Dells recent announcement to ship their computers packaged with Ubuntu lead to the question of Linux on the desktop. Michael Sikorsky (Cambrian House Inc.) stated that Linux will definitely win the mobile market, even if it won’t make it on the desktop.

How to provide support for all Linux distributions

Mike Guiterman (SourceFire, the company behind Snort) made a general comment on what the diversity of available Linux distributions means to his Open Source company: They make sure that their product supports the main distributions and have the community provide solutions and services for all other.

Datamation Lists Mindquarry as Bleeding-Edge Open Source Company

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Datamation just published an article entitled Ten Bleeding-Edge Open Source Companies:

Firms that represent the future of open source, from start-ups to established enterprise plays. We look at strategy, funding, and management.

The article also sheds a light on Mindquarry and IMHO, they paint a realistic competitive landscape and identify the main challenges as well as potentials for Mindquarry.

We see a lot of potential in our unique and compelling business model, which can be described as “Web 2.0 meets Open Source”. We (will) offer Mindquarry packaged as

The combination of these is a huge competitive advantage. For example, users of our upcoming SaaS offer can potentially also use Open Source clients for Mindquarry (e.g. to manager their tasks offline) developed by our community (e.g. for their PDA or Mobile Phone).

Managed Intuition

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Seth Godin writes:

[…] the art of management is in understanding that all problems are different, and that your intuition and insight are the key.

On HBS Working Knowledge I read in When Not to Trust Your Guts:

[…] with the use of intuition comes the potential for significant psychological biases that lead to irrationality. By accepting this fact, you can learn to overcome bias and think more rationally during your most important negotiations.

Management is also about managing intuition.

Chain of Knowledge Production in Open Source Companies

Sandro Groganz 1 Comment

If your Open Source company plans to sell books about its products or do community marketing via Weblogs, then you need a strategy that takes into account the whole chain of knowledge production within and outside of your organization to be truly successful.

That chain leads from “raw material” such as emails to a blog entry that a staff member writes about a solution found in an email discussion. Another employee or community member might write an article based on that blog post and from several similar articles you could make a book.

In short: email -> blog -> article -> book.

A book is on the one side something like a high-end knowledge product. On the other side, it helps others to learn about your products and to innovate. That would be an ideal knowledge life cycle.

Open Source companies need to take into account the tight relationship they have with the community. The borders between those groups blur and eventually corporate knowledge management also needs to focus on the community.

In fact, the production of knowledge products by Open Source companies will work quite similar to how Open Source code is being created. That means, by listening to your community, you will understand what kind of knowledge products aka type of information they need most. This will help you to avoid wrong investments in the creation of knowledge products.

Web 2.0 in 20 Years

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The Web 2.0 paradigm has reached mass media. We read about it in newspapers and hear about it on CNN. Now that the hype is really big, its death is also close. Let’s take an unagitated look at the Web 2.0 phenomena: What will be left in 20 years?

Some heroes

Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 and hence further helped to establish himself and his company as a trend setter and a leading WWW think tank. They even do good marketing around it. Tim, you deserve it: we’ll still remember you in 20 years – just like the Google, Flickr, YouTube, etc. founders.

Big Mac 2.0

With “2.0” we got one more label for marketing in the spirit of “reloaded”, “next generation”, etc. Only history can tell, how much longer it will be used and for which products. How about “Big Mac 2.0″?

Refrigerators of knowledge

Times are moving fast and in 20 years, the Web 2.0 will be a normal part of our life, just like refrigerators. Indeed, I am saying that the Web 2.0 is here to stay. It will be an integral part of the knowledge society and the always-online generation. That’s because the companies behind the Web 2.0 understand the needs of the mass of knowledge workers.

For example, those who blog (and effectively share knowledge), would like to know about the commentators and visitors of their site (using pingback, trackback, Google Analytics, etc.) to reflect upon the interests of their audience and optimize their information offerings. Web 2.0 provides the tools for the knowledge economy.

Knowledge workers want to use the Internet to treat their goods (aka information pieces) world-wide, hence reaching all potential customers. Tim O’Reilly said it very well:

The Web 2.0 lesson: leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.

The Web 2.0 will be as normal as refrigerators in 20 years – refrigerators which keep your knowledge fresh.

Modeling our daily life

Once there was a shining term coined “New Economy” which today causes pains for those who lost a lot of money back then. In fact, the crash of the new economy was a usual and typical phase of the adoption of new disruptive technologies.

What’s that got to do with the Web 2.0? Well, I am saying that the Web 2.0 is the succeeding (and much longer) phase of economic consolidation after the hype years of the Internet boom. The Web 2.0 is characterized by mature businesses built upon a more mature new technology and mature users better understanding the benefits of that technology. In terms of socio dynamics: several Web technologies have reached a level of maturity and sum up to a critical mass to actually constitute a new quality of applications. Just think of today’s better cross-browser interoperability allowing for AJAX.

Did you know that there were 274 American car manufacturers in 1909 before the car market collapsed just like the new economy did? In 1955 there were only 7 manufacturers left and the car had revolutionized our daily lives and made the 7 manufacturers very profitable.

The basic technological concepts of cars are nothing spectacular anymore, but they had and still have a big impact on societies as a whole. The same will happen with the Web 2.0: a change from hype to seamless integration and modeling of our daily life. That change is what a (German) article calls the transition from the new economy to the next economy.

It’s about maturity

Having said that, Web 2.0 is more about a concept explaining a mature symbiosis between a rather new technology and a changing society than about software alone. Critiques saying that the Web 2.0 is nothing new, are mostly right when it comes to the base technologies behind it. XML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. are indeed nothing new. Instead, those building the Web 2.0 have simply learned how to effectively make use of these technologies to solve the daily needs of knowledge workers.

True or not?

To testify my projections, we still got 20 years to go. One thing is already sure though: There will be some revisions of Web 2.0 within the next 20 years because we are still in the early days of the next economy. As a start, get Web 2.0.1.

Update:

Testifying the hype: Web 2.0 Most Cited Wikipedia Entry of the Year.

Linux goes Management

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The way how the Linux community is organised gets growing awareness in management, not only in that of software companies. Harvard Business Review published an article entitled Collaboration Rules, were the Linux community is being compared with the organisational structure of Toyota. The article is in general worth to read. I have read the
German version which is published in the current issue of Harvard Business Manager.

The authors’ basic statement is: “Corporate leaders seeking to boost growth, learning, and innovation may find the answer in a surprising place: the Linux open-source software community.” And they continue: “Specifically, Toyota and Linux operate by rules that blend the self-organizing advantages of markets with the low transaction costs of hierarchies.”

Management will indeed be able to learn a lot from Linux or the FOSS movement in general, as it can be regarded as the prototype organisational form of knowledge work. Today, most products are knowledge-based, even if it is simply the design of your coffee cup. Thus, the culture of open sources can be applied to various companies of any kind.

The article analyzes what I’d call a company culture of open sources, where information is freely shared between various stakeholders of a production process, be it software (Linux) or industrial goods (Toyota). Such a company culture is very much one that gives community members or employees the freedom to develop their skills and personality.

Unfortunately, the article deals with the aspects of knowledge companies for individuals only marginally. It could nicely be approached from the notion of humans as open sources as elaborated in the latest book of Gunter Dueck: Topothesie (German only). Then it becomes obvious, that doing it the Linux way also means a change of management styles and human interaction at work in general.

The Freedom of Open Source Employees

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The getting fired for blogging discussion is highly interesting when seen from the Open Source perspective. The basic question then is: Does the Open Source collaborative model lead to a more sound relationship between Open Source companies and their employees?

I can whole heartedly answer with yes.

Independence

The key to a sound relationship between a company and its employees is independence – not only in the Open Source business. In general, any relationship between humans can only work if all parties can keep their independence.

The term independence, as I understand it, includes the ability for mutually beneficial consensus. Only individuals or organisations who are able to act independently, can find healthy solutions in a conflict situation.

Such an understanding of independence includes, paradoxically enough, that you are very much aware of your dependence. You simply know that nothing great can be achieved in life, if you are doing it solely on your own.

Freedom

The freedom of an individual or an organization to shape its future, leads to the afore described independence. Because freedom implies that the executing party is responsible for failures and successes. This inevitably leads to understanding independence as a result of responsibility and freedom, with the awareness of dependence.

Pride

From here on, it is simple to put together the pieces: When working in an Open Source project that appreciates your contributions, you gain self-confidence. Even if you’d never become a core-developer of the project, even little success can make you feel proud and aware of your abilities. This makes you more independent from others, because with knowing what you can achieve, you can better achieve what you want.

Respect

Business organizations who employ an Open Source developer, always have to respect that this person is being respected by the Open Source project’s community. The employee’s self-confidence is fueled by a community, not necessarily by the company that pays his salary. Although working in a company, especially if it is an Open Source company, can be very rewarding.

Open Relationships

Now ask yourself, how big problems with blogging can really become in an Open Source company like MySQL or eZ systems? I’d say that they tend towards zero, because any Open Source undertaking is based on the kind of independence and mutual respect laid out here.

UKUUG: Free and Open Source Software in the Health Service

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I was interested in learning about an area of software engineering that I have not dealt with yet, hence I attended Anand Ramkissoon’s talk Free and Open Source Software in the Health Service.

Anand outlined the history of medical lab software:

In the 1980s: various in house systems have been built, which were
– well specified
– unique to specialism
– unique to individual lab
– constrained by hardware
– not portable
– driven by enthusiasm with no budget

Then, in the 1990s, commercial systems became available that descended from in house systems. Their characteristics:
– mainly multi specialism
– mainframe based
– written to a simplistic specification awkwardly extended
– quality could be higher

Since 2000 and onward, we see the death of in house systems. The Y2K compliance killed off the last in house systems. Also, a retreat from strategic involvement in specification by the medical labs can be observed, which is to Anands oppinion “a huge mistake”. Another characteristic of the current situation is the commercial lock-in, mainly due to proprietary data formats. In this regard, the medical labs have a lack of power in negotiations, because the main companies simply refuse to port old data, allthough it is a requirement by the labs. And the vednors refuse even if there are no technical constraints. Hence, the buyers have to believe it, because they have no influence in the development process

Anands alarming general statement is that “the quality of software currently used in UK labs is poor, absolutely poor”. The reasons are that there is virtually no competition with 3 different software systems in the UK, and globally not many more. Why are there not more vendors, he asked himself? And answered: There’s no balance of power in the market and the software is hard to specify as it requires detailed knowledge.

The reality is that people at health services invest an awfull lot amount of time to clean up after the software. This situation is paired with the counter-productive philosophy in higher and middle management of health services, that investing in new technologies is only possible when employees are laid off.

In summary, the health services in the UK, maybe even world-wide, and especially the medical labs are currently in the phase of vendor lock-in (sounds familiar to me when thinking of the general history of FOSS). Consequently, Anand started the project “Ganesh” to find a common standard for data interoperability, as well as developing an Open Source reference implementation.

The aims of the project “Ganesh”:
– portability of databases, extracts and records
– global specimen identifiers
– not an obvious idea to medical houses
– vertical processes
– sepcimen centred: log, aliquot, test, refer, report, validate, comment, authorise, store, discard
– horizontal processes
– “back room”, QA, QC, workload measurement, global test QA
– modular extensible

Anand, good luck!