CIOIN

I recently gave a presentation at CIO on 'Making Your Organization Open Source-Ready', which focuses on understanding the difference between proprietary and commercial software, developing a license and use policy, ensuring an architectural policy so that open source activities are consistent with enterprise architecture, and so on. During the lively discussion, one question, posed by CIO editor Chris Koch, really struck me: "Why," Chris asked, "are so many CIOs completely uninterested in open source? In survey after survey, open source comes up extremely low as an important issue. It's a bimodal distribution - some CIOs are very pro open source, while many (or most) others dismiss."

I've thought about the question quite a bit since the presentation, and I thought I'd offer some reasons why CIOs aren't very interested in open source along with a perspective about why they're missing a sea change that will metamorphose their way of doing business.

Here's why CIOs don't care about OS:

Spend small, think small. Organizational interest inevitably revolves around the spending of money. Initiatives that require significant budgets get everyone's attention. Smart people see leaders spending a ton of time thinking about an initiative and recognize that's their promotion vehicle. Open source, by contrast, typically requires 90 percent of the budget for proprietary software, so it doesn't have the high profile of being discussed endlessly.

While the proprietary vendors love this, it is extremely threatening to IT organizations, as they are steadily being milked by vendors and fail to exercise vigilance in seeking out new ways of getting the job done. I've worked in IT organizations that had end users choose to use outside service providers because they offered much less expensive solutions; IT can fume all it wants, but if its solution is the official, expensive way, it can expect attacks by open source-enabled end user initiatives.

They aren't told to pay attention. The old cliche was "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Today's cliche is "We only buy products from companies in the upper right quadrant." There's only one problem with that approach. OS products and companies don't play in the analyst-approval game. With open source not present in the analyst game, CIOs never hear about the products when they read their analyst subscriptions, go to conferences, or get briefed. In general, analysts are trailing indicators about new, disruptive entrants into markets, and this is doubly so for open source, which operates by a completely different set of rules than incumbent vendors.

They're fighting the last war

They're fighting the last war. The 90's were all about replacing creaky, obsolete, home-grown apps with packaged software. IT organizations suffered through years of poorly performing, functionally deficient, extended rollouts of enterprise apps. Now that CIOs have finally got these under control, they want to focus on optimizing them. There's only one problem with that approach: it misses the software revolution going on under their noses. It's reminiscent of the PC revolution - compared to the then-existing hardware infrastructures, PC were laughable little toys. IT organizations instinctively resisted the introduction of PCs, worried about their poor security, end user customizability, and, above all else, lack of centralized IT control. Guess what? PCs entered through every pore in the organization, driven by end users reveling in the new form factor that made previously unobtainable apps available at dirt-cheap prices. IT finally assented to the inevitable. Open source represents just the same kind of economic transformation, only this time it's worse: the barbarians are attacking from the inside. IT employees are typically introducing open source into companies, often with no awareness at all by upper management. Failing to come to terms with this software revolution will be a career limiting move.

Bottom line: there are lots of reasons CIOs don't care about OS software. Not doing so, however, is failing to exercise true technology leadership, which is, after all, one of the prime duties of the top job, right? CIO