Friday Five — July 17, 2015

An open organization is a business model based on igniting employee passion and engagement. It is designed to foster an employee-owned, inclusive, decision-making process. This contrasts with a traditional "top-down" business model, centered around hierarchy and dictating from the top... Jim [Whitehurst] described his role as Red Hat's CEO as follows: "My job is to create the context for people to be successful"... Asked how entrepreneurs can find employees who fit the open organization and help it prosper, Jim made several points: Interview for a cultural fit, accept that a small fraction of employees "can't handle the chaos", and the open organization will attract millennials.

Leaders in HR, marketing, logistics and other business units drive their own digital innovation. They approach technology differently, trying new analytic tools, cloud solutions and technology services. Sometimes, they don't invite IT to lead the development. Sometimes IT can't match their agile temperament and timetable... This leads to the digital divide widening between what the IT organization can provide and what the enterprise wants and needs... The answer is bimodal IT. In Mode 1, IT operates traditional IT services, emphasizing safety and accuracy – what a traditional IT organization does best. Mode 2 emphasizes agility and speed, like a digital startup. Thus, one organization can operate at two speeds. The business coordinates, communicates, and leverages shared knowledge. More so, it focuses on one shared, not competing, goal: to improve performance.

In microservices architectures, apps are built as a suite of small, semi-autonomous processes that perform specific tasks and use APIs to communicate with each other. Microservices are meant to be easy to use and scalable, and increasingly figure in web, mobile and internet-of-things apps... However, just because a number of factors and technologies have come together to make microservices the architecture of the moment doesn't make it plain sailing... If you are considering microservices, the best place to begin is with good software engineering practice.

When we decided to tell the e-NABLE story, we thought we were telling a story about children and their parents finding affordable choices because of new technology and open collaboration. That turns out to be just a small portion of the overall picture. We found a research and development model that relied on users becoming designers, and a community committed to bringing different usable prototypes to smiling children in a matter of months. Look for the full short documentary film later this summer.

"In the last two-and-a-half years, everybody's been bitten with the open-source bug, it seems like. Some are very traditional IT companies – and they're partners of ours, and great partners – but if you look at HP and VMware and now even Oracle, they're all talking about open source... That's been driven by a number of things. One, customer interest. They like the model where you can have input into the product, into the community... Second, it's the cloud. Industry analysts say 80-plus percent of clouds are built on open source."