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Peter Gallagher | System reuse: Embracing insanity

Progressive Disclosure—commentary

By Peter Gallagher, Special to GCN

In 2000, an oddly named technology book, titled Embracing Insanity, made a decidedly one-sided case for shared coding efforts via the open-source software model. The author, Russell Pavlicek, makes a compelling pre-Web 2.0 argument for how groups of people with common interests could combine talents in all sorts of unexpected ways to create value. Pavlicek contrasts the traditional, tightly controlled software team process with the untidy world of markets in which ideas and products are adapted at lightning speed in response to all kinds of competitive pressures.

Today, the phenomenon of net-enabled collective wisdom — Pavlicek’s “insanity” — has manifested itself in so many places that it is a paradigm. From Wikipedia to Facebook to countless other spaces, people are finding ways to create value through sharing. The public sector — an environment that strives for transparency — should be an ideal environment for a democratic networked model. Particularly in support of information technology systems, one might expect governmental bodies, with common requirements for interaction, to be overrun by collaboration given the advanced communication tools now available.

But is the federal, state and local government collective being used to create reusable or shared IT assets? Is it realistic to think that competing contractors will share anything of value?

The huge potential value of government to collaborate on optimizing IT resources has yet to be realized. Clearly, agencies at all levels buy and develop many of the same systems because they have many of the same business processes to support. This is especially true for the balkanized state and local markets. Efforts to encourage systems collaboration, such as the Government Open Source Conference initiated in 2005, continue to grow. And collaborative repositories, such as the Government Open Code Collaborative and GovernmentForge, have existed for years. But contrast them with the private sector, and it is clear that the evolution of government-specific solutions has lagged.

The private sector has taken great advantage of networked communities, especially in forging direct input from users/customers. Hardly a day goes by without something new popping up from one of the new wave companies, the poster parent of which has to be Google. How do its leaders do it so fast and so efficiently that the company has become one of the most profitable start-ups ever, with market capitalization approaching $200 billion?

A key to Google’s success has been reuse of software via open-source models. Just check out the thousands of open-source projects at Google, and it is easy to understand the vital role that such software plays at the company. In fact, many of the most profitable new technology companies — from Yahoo to Amazon — have relied on open-source technology.

More news on related topics: IT Management, Software Applications, Workflow / Collaboration



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