From the Editors: Embrace Enterprise 2.0

By SD Times Editorial Board

December 1, 2009 —

Social networking is entering the workforce. It’s our role to support that new technology and to encourage efforts to improve business productivity using social tools.

However, we should tread cautiously. IT should not get too far ahead of management and workers and launch grand initiatives that don’t solve real business problems. We should also be careful not to impose too many controls on social computing: Centralization will stifle innovation. Top-down approaches or imposing a hierarchical model will neutralize the benefits of Enterprise 2.0.

Social networks are transforming the personal lives of many people in many parts of the world. Whether you’re in the U.S., Japan, China or Europe, it’s hard for many people between the ages of 15 and 65 to go even a few hours without checking their Facebook or Twitter account. So it’s only natural that those technologies are finding their way into the office.

If colleagues are also friends on Facebook, it seems natural to leverage that path as a more efficient vehicle for collaboration than corporate e-mail. After all, co-workers are already used to phoning or texting each other using personal cell phones instead of routing messages through the PBX.

Our advice is to watch for skunkwork initiatives in social networking, but instead of crushing them, find ways to support them using secure, scalable channels. If different business units or project teams are experimenting with separate offerings, let all those trials go forward. Social networking tools—and use cases—are changing quickly, and today’s super-popular solution may be tomorrow’s dinosaur.

Embrace the gardens of innovation within your company. Your end users are very likely smarter about these issues than anyone in the software development department; you can learn from them and benefit your entire company.

Apache’s decade of success
The Apache Software Foundation is uniquely successful, and we applaud its first 10 years of delivering software that benefits not only the Apache community, but also the software industry and enterprise developers.

When you compare Apache with other industry groups that started out to support the Java platform, like the Eclipse Foundation or the Java Community Process, you realize that they can’t be compared.

Apache represents a community of developers who work together to build software that solves specific problems. Tomcat provides an application container for Java servlets and JavaServer Pages. The HTTP Server is, well, a simple HTTP server. Ant is a Java-based build tool. Hadoop provides infrastructure of scalable distributed computing. Geronimo is a Java EE 5 application server. Tapestry is an application framework for Web applications.

Each of these has a fairly limited scope, and each project is designed to deliver immediately useful open-source software. There’s no big agenda: just a problem, a solution, and a team of people who work to evolve that solution.

Contrast that with, say, the Java Community Process. The JCP’s job is to advance Java itself by creating specifications for new features, and a structure for interoperability. While the JCP creates reference implementations of most Java Service Requests, there’s no doubt that these are indeed reference implementations, not finished products. It’s left up to the JCP’s members to create commercial-grade implementations of each JSR.

You can also contrast Apache against the Eclipse Foundation. Eclipse is a vendor consortium where competitors get together to build common software. Those companies can then use Eclipse’s software as is or build commercial products on top of it.

Both the JCP and Eclipse Foundation are incredibly successful. Yet, because its only goal is to create great software—not to further anyone’s business goals or push a specific agenda regarding Java or open-source software—the Apache Software Foundation occupies a unique place in the software development industry.

Happy birthday, Apache, and thank you for a decade of outstanding success.

Related Search Term(s): Apache

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