Working in the open

This blog represents my own – pretty feeble – attempt to work in the open, sharing my ideas with the broader community and getting feedback and insights along the way.  I don’t worry about who’s reading it – customers, competitors etc because I trust that the benefits are greater than the risks and that what I share I am sharing with the community for the greater good.  However I don’t get to share anywhere near as much as I would like to.

In fact I think that CSC generally does way too much work behind closed doors because of some misguided view that this work somehow provides us with competitive advantage by being private.  In fact I think the opposite is true.

The vast majority of the development activity I am involved in is of commodity tools and processes that would be best developed with a community of like minded individuals, customers, suppliers and even competitors.   Customers don’t contract with CSC to get hold of these carefully guarded documents, rather they are partnering with us to get access to trusted advise, rapid low risk delivery and managed operations.

For example what competitive advantage comes from our standard operating system configurations, our reference architectures or our decision support material and technology positions, none/very little in my view. 

In fact I think we and our customers would benefit from these being developed in a more open way, with full input from customer experts, suppliers and others.  The results would be more authoritative and accurate and we would get more visibility and be seen as providing more thought leadership.

Blogs are a first step in becoming more open and participative within the community, but lets be clear they are tiny steps and I look forward to much bolder steps as we grow, taking my inspiration from enterprises that are taking open source software principles and embedding them into their core values.