Pioneering tomorrow's IT

What does it mean to be an open enterprise? Open source software and open standards are easy enough to define. Figuring out how they fit into an enterprise IT strategy, however, can be a little trickier.

For example, sometime late in the last century I was drafted to do some minor coding on a Web project for a large international bank. The task was simple enough: Store contact information for customers who signed up for an online promotion. It didn't take long to settle on Perl to make it happen.

For the noncoders among you, grabbing and filing data like that is what Perl excels at. Compared with C, which barely distinguishes between a string of characters and a series of numbers, Perl offers numerous tools for parsing, shuffling, and sorting text. And Perl is much safer than C, because the finer details of memory management and buffer maintenance have already been taken care of.

With these thoughts in mind, it was with the utmost confidence that our team presented its development plan to our client at the bank. Imagine our surprise, then, when we heard the reaction of the client's systems guru over the long-distance conference call.

"Perl?" he asked, warily. "Isn't that some kind of public-domain software?"

As I said, this was years ago. Open source hadn't garnered the reputation it enjoys today, and no financial institution worth its salt would have even considered running Linux on a production server. Still, even back then, a Unix administrator claiming to have never heard of Perl? Surely he was putting us on.

What we'd failed to grasp was the difference in perspectives between ourselves and our client. To a smallish Web development shop, choosing the right tool for a job meant weighing technical merits against the alternatives, given the time and resources at our disposal. The bank, however, had numerous other concerns to think about -- ranging from corporate policy and fiduciary responsibility to regulatory compliance and who knows what else. Development expediency simply wasn't the top priority.

As programmers and IT managers, we tend to see open source as a powerful tool. Its development process allows projects to harness top talent from across the globe, while its licensing ensures us that, as customers, we'll avoid vendor lock-in and other pitfalls of proprietary software. And certainly the price is right.

To the business managers who draft corporate policy, however, open source is often a disruptive force, one that brings not confidence but uncertainty. Who will guarantee that this software works as advertised? How can we be sure it's secure, or that it can scale to meet our needs? Could choosing open source today deny us a competitive advantage that proprietary software might have given us tomorrow?

Ultimately, helping to answer questions such as these may be the greatest role IT must play in crafting the open enterprise. Open code and open standards are here to stay. They're the future. But we shouldn't be blinded by our eagerness to break out of the traditional mold. We have to keep asking questions if we're going to find the right answers to suit our business goals.

Luckily, the beauty of open source is that we're in this together. Each week, I'll examine open standards, projects, and platforms with a view to how they can add real value to your business. No politics here; ideologues with an agenda to push won't change the face of enterprise IT. But an ongoing, public conversation -- between the open source community, IT managers, and the business managers whose needs they serve -- just might.