The about page of the open management consortium states the primary objective as “Create awareness of open source management tools in the market”, so the focus is open source mangement tools. Fair enough.
But open management need not mean open source management. There is a lot more to openness than seeing the source code. In my experience ability to see the code is not even highly sought after by the customers ( I work with). I think the term “open source” has come to embody a lot of things that we’ve been longing for: interoperability, integration, transparency which are also somewhat mentioned in the objectives. I think the “Open Management” as a term is a better embodiment of these principles.
This is not just a play with words. The nuance is important. There are already calls for the large management vendors (loosely referred as Big 4) to open source their products. I don’t this approach is neither realistic nor productive. I think we ought to demand them to be more “open”, and this does not mean they have to open source their products. There are many other steps that are much less controversial, yet may even be more useful for the industry. IT management vendors (as most software vendors) are typically very “closed” organizations. What do I mean by that?
How many of you have signed an NDA with a vendor? It’s pretty much demanded by every company I dealt with so far that restricts what I can share in public. NDAs are used routinely in the industry. You want to have access to software, you have to sign an NDA. This may sound trivial but I think it illustrates the attitudes and the problem. Tendency is guard information, not share it.
Can you go to the websites of the Big 4 (or to any of the other large management tools vendors) , download the product you’re interested and give it a spin to see whether it meets your needs? Overwhelming majority of the vendors do not even have evaluation copies available. Transparency. Do you feel like you can participate in the direction the product? Can you even see where the product is heading? And pricing. Can you tell how much the price of the product is without putting a gun on the account manager’s head?
I think “open source” products are on the rise, not necessarily because we can see the code (most of us can’t care less) or we can contribute to the development (most of us are not devleopers) but if a product is open source, it is assumed to be “open”. We can take the open source product,s evaluate/use as long as we want, learn from experiences of the others in the community, and earn our say on where the product is heading, well, not always, but may be most of the time.
In short, I believe we should value emphasize the open in open source more.
I think one reason we are relying on open source as the litmus test for openness is that the other criteria for open source is easier to establish than criteria for being open. Not having an established way to measure openness, it is easy to descend into subjective “I’m more open” pissing match. So I wonder whether it would be possible to come with the criteria to measure how open a company is. I’ve already hinted some of my criteria, I’m sure there are other better ones.
1. Access to the software. There is no reason why potential customers and partners should not be able to download and evaluate the software, without being harrassed by sales people first.
2. Published APIs and developer programs. Almost all companies claim some sort partner program, but few has active ones, and there are lots of barriers. No reason why the API and documentation should not be available to any interested party, along with the software. The process to become a partner or use the APIs should be simple and transparent. Software vendors should take a page from the book of companies like Google, Yahoo and Amazon in creating APIs and developer ecosystems. The process to use APIs should be straight forward both from technical and commercial perspectives. This is essential for integration and interoperability.
3. No NDAs to silence customers and partners. Let people share their opinions and knowledge as they like. In all these years in the industry I’ve signed many NDAs, I don’t think I ever knew anything worth protecting. This approach is simply poisonous to sharing and collaboration.
4. Available communication channels for the community to participate. Having couple of product managers talk to couple of important customers simply won’t do. To ensure the products stay relevant and useful, the best option is to let the community have a stong voice and provide guidance. This is probably harder to quantify than others.
5. Transparent pricing. The game of hiding the prices, having very high list prices and offering big discounts is getting old. Why not publish the prices?
If the software vendors did all of the above but kept the source closed, I’d be more than happy. I’d wager that most companies would not score all that well using these criteria.
What do you think? Are these reasonable? Other criteria to quantify openness of a company?
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