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Reflections on OSCON

It appears to me that, after having talked to countless people at OSCON, there is still a significant disconnect between IT and the rest of the business.

I say this because IT representatives had a pretty good idea of what they wanted to do and why. However, when it came to getting someone to pony up the coin to make the changes necessary to move forward, IT representatives, for the most part, were at a loss for how to shake out the money tree.

The biggest reason is that business views IT as a cost center, and so spending on IT needs to be minimized as much as possible. When I asked what the criteria for making decisions was, the inevitable answer was money. The bottom line loomed so large that it drowned out any other competing interest. This is short-sighted and reflective of a company trying to make this quarters numbers without looking at how its going to make next quarters numbers, much less next years numbers.

To me, this is analogous to building a house out of particle board. Sure, once the house is done, the total cost of building the house will be extremely low. It will also be a cheap house and will serve no habitable purpose.

Even for companies that are willing to spend to improve their IT systems, often, they did not know the business purpose they were trying to achieve. They did not know where the weaknesses in process were that the appropriate application of technology could improve. Furthermore, they did not consider total cost of ownership rather than up front price. I liken this to putting caulk around a leak. It might work. But it might also be only a temporary fix and cost more in the long run. Only good solid analysis of the problem and true understanding of a set of requirements can determine if what youre seeking is truly the answer that you want.

Finally, there is an appetite for knowledge about Agile Development, but seemingly few resources available. We gave away Andy Hunts book Practices of an Agile Developer, that can help teams and developers get started down the path.

All in all, the convention was time well spent. We met a lot of people and got in touch with what was going on in the open source community. We will definitely plan on being at OSCON 2007, and we will make sure we leave enough time to do more discovery of the Columbia River gorge!