Do you want funding on an OSS project?

OSS tend to be very technical and transactional in nature. For example, a critical alarm happens, so we have to coordinate remedial actions as soon as possible. Or, a new customer has requested service so we have to coordinate the workforce to implement certain tasks in the physical and logical/virtual world. When you spend so much of your time solving transactional / tactical problems, you tend to think in a transactional / tactical way.

 

You can even see that in OSS product designs. They’ve been designed for personas who solve transactional problems (eg alarms, activations, etc). That’s important. It’s the coal-face that gets stuff done.

 

But who funds OSS projects? Are their personas thinking at a tactical level? Perhaps, but I suspect not on a full-time basis. Their thoughts might dive to a tactical level when there are outages or poor performance, but they’ll tend to be thinking more about strategy, risk mitigation and efficiency if/when they can get out of the tactical distractions.

 

Do our OSS meet project sponsor needs? Do our OSS provide functionality that help manage strategy, risk and efficiency? Well, our OSS can help with reports and dashboards that help them. But do reports and dashboards inspire them enough to invest millions? Could sponsors rightly ask, “I’m spending money, but what’s in it for me?”

 

What if we tasked our product teams to think in terms of business objectives instead of transactions? The objectives may include rolled-up transaction-based data and other metrics of course. But traditional metrics and activities are just a means to an end.

 

You’re probably thinking that there’s no way you can retrofit “objective design” into products that were designed years ago with transactions in mind. You’d be completely correct in most cases. So what’s the solution if you don’t have retrofit control over your products?

 

Well, there’s a class of OSS products that I refer to as being “the data bridge.” I’ll dive into more detail on these currently rare products tomorrow.