Open source to become a ‘best practice’
There are many magic rings in this world… and none of them should be used lightly. This is true.
It is also true that organisations in every vertical are now having to work hard and find automation streams that they can digitise (on the road to *yawn* digital transformation, obviously) and start to apply AI and machine learning to.
Another key truth lies in the amount of codified best practices that organisations now have the opportunity to lay down.
One we can denote a particular set of workflows in a particular department (or team, or group, or any other collective) to be deemed to be as efficient as possible, then we can lay that process down as a best practice.
Obfuscation
These best practices are often now taken forward as templates for other firms to be able to use (once any user data is appropriately obfuscated and anonymised), especially when the best practice itself is identified under the stewardship of some higher level platform provider.
But there is another way we should think about best practice i.e. we should think about its existence as a necessary part of open business in the digital age.
The existence of open source projects (and the use of open platform technologies) could be regarded as a piece of corporate best practice i.e. firms should directly identify that they do engage with open source, because life in a proprietary-only technology world would always be more restrictive.
This is part of the suggestion that comes out of a new survey undertaken by The New Stack and The Linux Foundation (via the TODO Group).
According to the report, “By implementing open source best practices, organisations are helping developers become both more productive and more structured in how they manage the often abundant open source software their businesses rely on.”
Almost 800 people were surveyed and around half we developers.
Wot no open source?
We’re not quite at the stage where people will refuse to take a job at a particular company based upon whether or not an organisation can evidence a substantial use of open source technologies — but we do know that that type of ethical concern is right up there for millennials and the Generation-Z workers just starting work now at the end of the current decade — so this could (and arguably should) be a trend to look out for.