Submitted to Open Enterprise

A day late, but I've submitted my abstract to Open Enterprise which focuses on agility (and seems to want to spark a proprietary vs. Open Source debate). Here's my abstract.

Openness as agility in business

In his criticism of Big Media entitled ``My Beef With Big Media'', Ted Turner explains why someone could not come up with a concept like CNN in the current media market. As media increasingly becomes a game played only by slow-moving titans, small and innovative companies simply can't make an impact.

Turner's message, while aimed at oligopolistic media, is applicable to standard companies.

There's little contest that innovation is primarily driven by entrepreneurs and small companies. In the dot-com era, larger companies were stumbling over themselves to grab ideas by buying such small companies and their ideas in the hopes of keeping up with their competitors.

Why did these companies not innovate themselves, with their large R&D; budgets? Why pay more than it would cost to find and employ those people? Is it because if those people were part of Big Business that they'd not be able to come up with their innovations?

Can Big Business learn to take the same risks, eschew overloaded and slow words like "enterprise ready" and "outsourcing" and take a little risk for a big potential gain of agility? Can paying more for open standards and the perceived risk in using Open Source change the IT department from the limiter it is today into a business accelerator tomorrow?

Précis

Can Big Business learn from entrepreneurial innovators and take some risks instead of hiding behind terms like "enterprise ready"? Could paying more for open standards or taking a risk on Open Source have a bigger payoff in terms of making the IT department a business accelerator?