Over the years ‘Open Source' development has become a very powerful philosophy and an engineering paradigm. At the very core, it represents access to the source code for everyone in the developer, as well as the users, community. This underlying philosophy encourages concurrent development, peer reviews and collaboration. These core characteristics of open source movement can be leveraged to nurture collaboration and collaborative innovation within an enterprise.
Today, most IT services companies have a technology group that is primarily responsible for innovation. But with a limited number of geeks and architects, how does a company keep pace with the rapid changes and advances taking place in the technology landscape? One way to address this is to create an internal open source platform that addresses multiple issues that plague the much commoditised IT industry today.
How does a company create an environment that forces innovation and intellectual property creation? How do you create an environment that provides opportunities for continuous learning? How do you ensure that your employees' time is used optimally?
These are some of the issues that we have tried to tackle through this initiative. Every project and every individual should try and create (and consume) assets that can be used and reused multiple times. This is the only way productivity and quality can be improved while maintaining competitive advantage.
Seamless
Open source initiative is a platform that makes creation and consumption of assets quite seamless and integrated with the project lifecycle. Regardless of what project someone is on, what kind of technology he/she is working on, everyone will want to make sure that they are constantly learning and keeping up with the technology trends.
By participating in projects in this platform, it is quite possible that someone working on a Java maintenance project is able to participate and learn something quite different, say cloud computing using Amazon EC2! Employees who are in between projects get to spend their time more productively by participating in any of the open source projects.
Key steps
The process revolves around three primary ‘actors' and four key steps for each of the hosted projects. The ‘Project Owner' manages a specific project and sets up the required environment and repositories for that project. He/she is also responsible for ensuring that various steps in the open source development lifecycle are adhered to. The ‘Contributor' could be anyone in the company and could play the role of a developer, reviewer, or tester. He/she works collaboratively with the rest of the contributors and the project owner.
The ‘Consumer' could be anyone who wants to use assets from a particular project in his/her own area. The ‘Consumer' also raises issues and possible enhancements for the assets, and creates the feedback mechanism that is essential for the continuous improvement of all assets.
‘Idea Space' is where all ideas are born. This is a discussion forum where anyone can create/share an idea for taking up as an open source project. Everyone chips in and after pros and cons are discussed and debated, some of these ideas will get into the open source platform as projects. This is the ‘Ideation and Initiation' phase. At this point a project owner is identified. During the next phase of collaborative development and review, contributors can start collaborating on this project as developers, reviewers, or testers. During the review phase, apart from ensuring code quality, extra focus is given to make sure that there are no IP infringements.
Integration
During the ‘Integration' phase, source code and assets from various contributors are integrated into a deployable build which is then tested as a single unit. Issues are logged, fixed, and retested, all in the open source platform. The ‘Implementation and Improvement' phase closes the loop and provides feedback to the entire lifecycle.
It is very easy for such initiatives to fail, unless awareness and a culture is cultivated amongst the community.
Therefore it is important to have a pilot phase for such an initiative, where adequate branding and internal evangelisation is done to popularise the concept and to get people familiarised with the process, platform and its benefits.
A platform of this sort that enables collaborative innovation can bring tremendous value to the company and its employees. From a relatively small dedicated innovation group, a platform such as this taps into a resource pool of the entire developer community of the company for ideas, assets, and components that can add to the collective IP and improve productivity quite dramatically.
(The author is Vice-President, Collabera, responsible for technology innovation and thought leadership)
