When Dan Hill, CIO of Exelon Energy, the $14 billion owner of two of the nation's largest electricity utilities, decided to outsource a major project, he evaluated several companies and then awarded the contract to Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), a global $16 billion IT services company with more than 90,000 employees in 80 countries. According to Lem Lasher, CSC's chief innovation officer and president of CSC's global business solutions, says that Hill was impressed with depth and breathe of CSC's Office of Innovation. "Hill said that's what played a key role in earning his business.

Lasher has every right to blow his horn about CSC's Office of Innovation. In 2007, the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), the organization that sponsors the Malcolm Baldridge Award, did an independent benchmarking study of companies with programs to embed innovation within the organization. Lasher says, "Our competitors, such as IBM, Accenture, and Hewlett-Packard, funded the study. We didn't." After reviewing CSC's innovation programs on the company's Web site, APQC interviewed Lasher and his team, and then audited all of CSC's innovation programs. As a result, CSC received one of APQC's five Best Practice awards. The other winners included four product companies -- HP Printing and Imaging, Efficon Endosurgery, Boston Scientific, and Air Products. He says, "We were the only professional services firm to get this award. It has given us a huge competitive advantage."

Recently, enterpriseleadership.org sat down with Lasher to discuss the many programs that comprise CSC's Office of Innovation. Here is what he had to say:

EL. Why did CSC decide to create an Office of Innovation?

LL. We needed to do something different about the way we operated. We wanted to bring about a change that would reflect an appropriate innovation agenda for our customers and for the business. We began by reorganizing a number of activities and programs we ran across the enterprise. In April 2005, we set up the Office of Innovation to establish an explicit global innovation agenda within the company from idea generation through solutions development. The Office of Innovation functions as a funded corporate department which runs with unified governance and management structure responsible for CSC's innovation agenda to run the business.

EL. How does your office carry out thought-leadership programs for your customers?

LL. The Leading Edge Forum is the Office of Innovation's front-end piece where we do our basic research and development for thought leadership and business idea. This forum has two program activities. The executive program provides the thought leadership agenda for CIOs. The technology programs address socialization of intellectual capital rewards and recognition among the employees, and engagements with our customers.

EL. What do your customers' CIOs get from your innovation program?

LL. We'll create an account innovation program that we tailor to each customer. We have a formal taxonomy or a formal way of setting up those programs that includes agreed upon definition of innovation, objectives, governance, processes we'll put in place, funding mechanisms, commercial terms and conditions, and underlying technologies and tools that support that. Each program is unique and specific to each customer. My team spends much time with customers, designing account innovation programs that an account team runs and my office supports.

EL. Does your office have any type of a research component?

LL. Our internal research network comprises a group of individuals who do market-based analysis and research for CSC employees. We might use this group's findings for making investment decisions, for making offshore location decisions, for doing competitive analysis, and for investigating various types of technologies and products. This global research covers all of CSC's business lines and verticals.

EL. How do get ideas flowing from both employees and customers?

LL. The Office of Innovation program called CSC Collective Intelligence runs ideation campaigns for customers, for employees, for internal organizational challenges, or for specific account issues we have. We have a good record running these programs.

EL. Can you explain how an ideation campaign works?

LL. We view ideation as something done in a short-term, project setting that focuses on solving a particular problem. We call this activity a campaign. We'll identify a particular problem we want to solve, and then we'll create the appropriate executive ownership, the appropriate executive governance, and the taxonomy for triage of the ideas that come in. Each campaign ends with a solution that customers or employees can carry out. We do measure the results of the campaign. It's not a standing suggestion box.

EL. Can you discuss the strategic aspect of your office?

LL. Our Global Service Offerings (GSO) group runs the programs office for the development of all of our global strategic offerings. This office abstracts the taxonomy, and maintains the repository, the portfolio, the business case, and all of the governance associated with how we make strategic investments in service offerings across the business.

The people who run these programs engage directly with customers for validation of concepts, for explaining to them what those propositions are and for helping them to shape those concepts around particular solutions.

EL. Does your office have specific programs that leverage intellectual capital?

LL. The Intellectual Capital and Knowledge Management program supports all of the CSC communities by harvesting, storing, and leveraging intellectual capital. This intellectual capital has been explicitly articulated and put in the repository. This program also provides technical support for groups of individuals who want to form communities across the business.

EL. How do you handle intellectual property for things that you develop in conjunction with a customer?

LL. We regard intellectual property as intellectual capital that we've protected in such as way to make it proprietary to CSC. As a services company, we aren't interested in acquiring intellectual property for patents. We have flexibility on the terms and conditions of how we would develop and use IT. We'll go through an analysis that says this particular intellectual capital warrants this level of protection and this position. If we've invested in something that would give us a competitive edge in the marketplace, we might be prone to get a patent on it. If we did something with a customer, we'd negotiate on a case-by-base basis about the ownership of the intellectual property.

EL. I haven't heard you mention breakthrough innovations or disruptive innovation. How much emphasis does your office put on them?

LL. We don't focus on breakthrough innovations, nor do we have an efficient way of managing them. Those types of innovations usually happen in a product company. We look at something we call the amplitude of innovation. It's the functional intersect between something being new to the company or being new to the marketplace. We look at the incremental and the adjacent innovations that result in leveraging a way to do something different to provide more economic value to our customers. If we came up with something we consider breakthrough, we'd probably figure out what to do with it. We're better off focusing our innovation activities on incremental and adjacent.

EL. What types of centers of excellence programs do you have?

LL. We refer to these programs as socialization of intellectual capital. We have centers of excellence and we have innovation centers. The 18 centers of excellence all have physical locations, have a dedicated team, and have a commitment from a group president to fund the center's activities for up to two years. Each center may or not focus on innovation, but each center has deep domain expertise. My office certifies each center of excellence as a way of establishing its importance to constituents within and outside the organizations. Each center's work must undergo a peer review process.

My office also runs some of the innovation centers in India, in Australia, and in the UK. The business groups supports the innovation center in Sweden and the U.S. We support those programs. These facilities do sandbox prototyping, workshops, and solutions demonstration showing vendor's products and technologies. Each center varies according to its geographical region. The centers share resources and communicate with each other. My office leverages the intellectual capital these centers provide. The centers run under their own governance structure.

EL. How do you reward employees for innovation?

LL. Our award programs run the gamut from an at'a boy to an at'a boy with stock options. Specifically, we have a paper's program, a grant's program, and the Chairman's Award for Excellence.

Employees can submit their original papers to the paper's program. If the peer reviewers come across an outstanding paper, it will get an award at the end of the year.

The grant's program funds both directed and non-directed work. We fund between 10 to 12 projects each year. For directed projects, we tell employees what we want them to research. In contrast, with undirected projects, employees tell us what they think they should research. Both types of research are subject to peer review. Although the grant's program doesn't offer any monetary reward, employees completing this program receive more recognition than those receiving a paper's program award.

The Chairman's award is the highest award employees can get for innovation. It's also the hardest award to win. Each year, the global division presidents nominate their respective candidates who've done an outstanding job on a project. Keep in mind, we do more than 10,000 projects a year. We narrow down between 100 to 150 nominations to 12 finalists, and then down to the six winners. The winners get stock options in CSC, and an invitation to a senior management award's meeting. We make up videos and issue employees a crystal glass reward.

EL. Do you also extend your office to academics?

LL. Our Leading Edge Forum manages relationships with professors at about 20 universities around the world. We look for universities where we can work with the leading professor whose innovative research is in an area germane to our business. We engage with those professors either on a contractual or on a retainer basis to do research work with us. We'll frequently rotate the list of universities we work with

EL. How do your work with David McCue, the CIO, to make IT investment decisions?

LL. My office's GSO group has a portfolio governance board that oversees the investment decisions we made. McCue is a member of this board. He is current with all the decisions we've made. He uses that as input for the kinds of things that make sense for him to do. He is a non-voting member of the board, but he sits on the board. The other people on the board include all of the global group presidents. They make the overall decisions for investments. The board of directors isn't involved at the service offering level. I negotiate a budget with the CEO, and have funds made available to me. I'm the custodian for this governance board. We vote that money in. Democracy rules! Each group president has one vote. We meet each month to discuss where we need to make investments and approve funding for some of them.

My office monitors and tracks those investments. For example, we track the revenue that comes in from the investments. We know what our rate of return is on investments.

We have some tools. I can't say off the top of my head what they are, but they aren't Excel spreadsheets.

Author: Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a technology writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.

In 2003, Zurich Financial Services, one of the world's largest insurance companies, decided to transform its highly centralized IT organization to a highly decentralized managed by a small internal staff and a major outsourcing partner. After evaluating several global outsourcing companies, Zurich Financial signed a $1.3 billion outsourcing agreement with Computer Sciences Corporation or CSC.

Many large, global companies, such as Zurich Financial and Chrysler, have turned to CSC for innovation IT services in one of these areas: outsourcing, systems integration, and consulting. Founded in 1960, CSC has more than 90,000 employees in 80 countries and annual revenues exceeding $16 billion. CSC's service span most vertical industry segments and many horizontal lines of IT services, such as outsourcing and supply chain.

Recently, David McCue, CSCs's CIO and vice president, got named to Computerworld's 2008 Premier 200 IT leaders list, a carefully selected group of IT executives selected for their leadership capabilities in managing and executing IT strategies. enterpriseleadership.org recently said down with McCue to learn more about how he makes technology decisions that affect both the internal IT organization but also customers. Here's what he had to say:

EL. Can you provide an overview of your IT organization, especially what makes it unique?

DM. Our IT organization combines a blend of a federated model and a centralized model to achieve the best results for the business. Each of the main revenue areas has an embedded technology staff CIO. These staff CIOs represent the requirements of that particular area, such as a vertical like manufacturing or a horizontal like applications. The aspects of our business that fall into a central shared services type of model include, email, security, content for repositories, and portals. We use SAP to handle all of our financials.

I treat things that we do for ourselves, such as payroll, messaging, collaboration, customer relations management, financials, and business analytics, as if we were an outsourcer account with CSC global. We have about 1,250 people assigned to the CSC IT account. We're one of the largest IT customers of CSC global, the vendor.

Our CIO council comprises the embedded CIOs, along with some individuals. For example, I've appointed people to global HR, supply chain, and financial functions. Each area of the business has an advocate. The council does planning, strategy, and final review of policies. Some of the subcommittees will review policies in certain areas and report any changes to the CIO council.

EL. Does the company's outsourcing model complement your IT business model?

DM. We think of the CSC IT account as having several serious buckets of activities. The account needs these items. For example, we use SAP instead of Oracle. If I need Oracle expertise, then I'll leverage the capabilities of CSC, the outsourcing vendor. I'm the 800 gorilla customer. We have buckets of activities or commodities, which the entire business equally shared. I have a leverage capability that wouldn't be available if we didn't have our business model for IT. Every time we win an outsourcing deal, we gain a certain amount of infrastructure. We then rationalize and normalize it through the outsourcing process. We can re-deploy this excess infrastructure to other accounts that can use it. My cash expenditure doesn't actually represent the actual value of total services that I own, control, and direct. Leveraging what we've acquired changes our cash expenditure in terms of where it shows up on the balance sheet.

EL. Can you describe how your governance process goes works for getting projects and investments approved?

DM. I sit on two sides of the tables. I report to the chairman and attend his staff meetings. My peers include group revenue-unit presidents and the corporate vice presidents for each of the major functions. Our program governance board comprises the group president and me. We decide the research and development investments for the business. We take a blended approach toward governance.

From an axiom viewpoint, I put forward the business case, the strategic direction, and evaluation. Our go-to-market revenue decisions don't, in themselves, dictate internal choice and direction. A decision that we make for ourselves, such as a business case to go in a certain direction, has to make sense and pass hard dollar and soft benefits hurdles on its own, independent of alliances, partnerships, and go to market revenues. If selling something is the only reason for the business case, then it fails. If I have multiple choice business case decisions to make, I'll select the ones that can stand on their own, that have good relationships, and that have revenue potential. At the end of the day, we go to market, given the nature of our business, with all of the major players.

EL. How do you decide what technologies would be good fit for IT?

DM. Just because I run SAP, doesn't mean that I don't have a robust Oracle practice. I have to do what makes sense for our IT our account and the best practices. I can't possibly run everything. I can't run SAP for financials and Oracle for payroll. The same thing happens when we go to market. We might have multiple solutions within similar areas based upon the intellectual property needs, and the unique requirements and specifics of different verticals. For example, processing insurance claims has some similarities to handling returns in a manufacturing environment. However, the products used in each of these areas have some practical differences. Everyone would like to run every solution. That's not practical! Because we'd incur additional excessive expenses, it wouldn't be in the best interests of our stockholders to run every solution.

EL. How much of a say do stakeholders have in how you make technology investment decisions?

DM. Stakeholders always have had the ability to voice their views. We have command and control and there's direction. Any time we make a decision between choices, we can't always achieve a win-win scenario for everyone. Having a hybrid or central and federated model helps us to ensure a dialog to talk about all of the cards on the table. Our common services have to scale globally to provide attractive economies.

We do the traditional set of roadmaps for a specific number of years, and we review those roadmaps routinely to look at different technologies, best practices, or changes in functional requirements.

Those embedded individuals represent their stakeholders' internal needs, as they're appropriate to the larger revenue customer base. We don't do business in isolation. We know what we're doing in the market. I sit on the research and development governance board. I look at the business cases for things we're developing as potential go-to-market solutions. I work closely with our general counsel and with the president of our global marketing organization. We take all of that into account and bring that into the mix.

EL. Have you automated your governance and your portfolio process for investments?

DM. I don't run a single portfolio project management dashboard type of product. We've automated the reporting of variety aspects of that through different schedules. One schedule lists projects for each fiscal year. Each project goes through a multiple cycle process. If a project passes the business case review, we then release the funds to start that project. Each project has various reporting milestones. These milestones differ in their degree of specificity, timeliness and risk tolerance. The sponsoring business units do quarterly reviews and reporting of the overall portfolio of the projects. Monthly monitoring and reporting at the application or infrastructure level also supplement these quarterly project reviews.

EL. How does CSC handle innovation?

DM. We have a corporate office of innovation, which expands all aspects of CSC's environment, including go-to-market strategies. It has a concentrated, managed set of projects, programs, and strategies. It runs a leading-edge forum, conducts various conferences, give innovation awards to employees, and operates centers of excellence. I belong to the office of innovation steering committee. We leverage this organization as an approach to innovation for IT.

EL. What automated processes have you put in place to handle emergency communications with your customers?

DM. Our emergency crisis notation system can quickly mobilize key people from around the world to act on a critical situation. They get notified through SMS, text messaging, or whatever other media they use for critical situations. As a global outsourcer, we have formal processes if a situation arises, such as a data center going off the grid or an application fails. Once we assemble the restoration team, we establish multiple audio bridges which the customer and the technical people. Our management people review these audio bridges every one or two hours for updates. Once the customer's problem has been resolved, such as data center brought online, we go through a mandatory root-cause analysis process, which my staff reviews.

EL. Can you provide examples of some of your converged platforms to get closer to your customers?

DM. Our CSC account and our customers use some of the same applications, such as GCARS, a controlled release to production review-type application. We all use it whether the item released to production relates to the customer account's own equipment, or will run on a customer's account on our leveraged equipment. We have a variety of converged platforms like that one. Both our employees and our main customers have access to our global portals. Of course, it has areas restricted to specific accounts and customers.

Author: Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a technology writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.

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The State of Michigan has become a pioneer in how to make IT work better and be more economically viable for its citizens. They focused on consolidating IT into one state agency, and then developing a strategic plan and an enterprise architecture to support the plan.

In 2001, the entire IT organization across the State of Michigan merged into the Michigan Department of Information Technology (MDIT), under the direction of Ken Theis. MDIT's 1,700 employees support 19 other state agencies. These agencies have a combined annual budget of $434 million, 800 business-critical applications, 55,000 desktops, and 1,300 telecom locations.

The consolidation reduced overall IT expenditures in Michigan by 34 percent, taking more than $100 million off the state budget. Some of these strategic moves included closing 23 data centers and creating three main data centers, reducing the number of email servers from 700 to 70, and centralizing one petabyte of data storage. Meanwhile, MDIT also addressed errors in programs, such as Food Stamps.

In this podcast, Ken talks about the agency's overall IT strategy, the components that comprise the enterprise architecture, the initiatives that are bringing smaller and more efficient government to the people of Michigan, and the challenge of managing IT investments.

Theis says, "If you can't measure it, you shouldn't be doing it. We continue to strive for returns on our IT investments. Sometimes the returns can be financial, and other times they might be services that benefit citizens. We're always looking to improve how we can increase the returns on our IT investments, especially in a tight economy."

Bio
Ken Theis is the director for the Michigan Department of Information Technology, where he reports directly to Governor Jennifer M. Granholm. He also serves in her cabinet. He was the deputy CIO for the Michigan Family Independence Agency (FIA), where he carried out a statewide child support enforcement system enabling the State to recover substantial federal penalties.

He previously worked for General Motors Corporation where he held several key business and technology leadership positions. While he was at General Motors, Theis received the GM Chairman's Honors Award and GM CIO Award.

He was recently named to Computerworld's Premier 100 list of top IT leaders in the country. He received his B.S. at Ferris State University and M.B.A. at Northwood University.

Resources
Converge Online - Michigan Department of Community Health Launches New Medicaid System
Converge Online - Michigan Joins Green Computing Initiative
The Michigan IT Consolidation Journal

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
AlarmMusic.com Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production

Core Competency. Many business leaders use the term core competency to describe where their companies put most of their efforts. Few of these people might be aware that C.K. Prahalad coined that term in 1989.  This university professor's best selling books, Competing for the Future, and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, have changed the way CEOs think about business strategy.

Now C. K. Prahalad, the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Strategy at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, has set out to change the way CIOs think about business strategy and their enterprise architecture as new business models force their companies to become more consumer-driven or customer-focused in a global economy. His new book, The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-Created Value Through Global Network, provides CIOs with both a blueprint of Prahalad's strategy and a host of examples of how it is already in work on some of today's best companies.

Prahalad says, "Established companies can no longer think of themselves as just selling discrete products, but how these products can provide customers with a unique experience." He cites the example of how Unilever, a traditional multinational company, encourages Ponds' skin care customers to specify their budget and their skin type to create a customized set of skin care products."

Recently, enterpriseleadership.org saw down with Prahalad to talk about how these new business models with alter the CIO's role, and what can both CIOs and other business leaders do to avoid any disconnects between IT and businesses processes. Here's what he had to say:

EL. Ten years from now, how will the CIO's role be different from what it is today?

CP. Within the next 10 years, the CIO's role will change because the CIO in a major company will sit on a major source of competitive advantage for the company. Flexible, adaptive, and response business practices will become a key source of competitive advantage. At the same time, focused analytics, which will allow managers to define the behavior of one person or one supplier at a time among millions of consumers, will offer another source of competitive advantage. To this end, the CIO plays a critical role in building the new information communications technology (ICT) architecture, which looks at these opportunities, and then it rethinks the way you can collaborate and be flexible. IT is going to matter significantly.

EL. What must CIOs and business leaders do to avoid any disconnects between IT and the business?

CP. In the book, we talk a lot about the emerging disconnect between business leaders and CIOs. Yes, CIOs need to have good technical expertise. However, CIOs must begin to have a distinct and clear point of view about where the business is going. They must begin to start talking the language of the business and to understand the possible directions of the business. Likewise, the business unit leaders must take responsibility for understanding the opportunities that the information communications technology architecture provides. CIOs will miss the boat if they continue to gravitate mostly to managing IT more efficiently, and if all of the return on investment calculations are based on savings in the IT organization rather than profit growth in the business.

EL. Do CIOs really understand the economic impact that IT has on the business? To be more specific, how many CIOs think in terms on how a change will affect the gross margins? 

CP. Some do, but most of them don't.  The architecture of the company has it exists today can become an impediment for the growth of business. Therefore, we need to establish a new dialogue between business unit leaders and CIOs. This's inevitable. If the current CIOs don't want to engage in that debate, they'll loose out and just become technology managers, not partners in creating new business opportunities.

EL. How many companies really have the business strategy and IT strategy in one entity?

CP. If you think of ICIC example in my book, I'd see that no one in senior management at that company thinks of the IT strategy and the business strategy as two distinct spheres. They can't isolate IT from the business strategy and the business from the IT strategy. They think of it as one in the same.

In the financial services industry, the IT strategy and the business strategy should be one in the same. The interesting question is this: Can you be a strategist and a business leader in a company like MasterCard, VISA, or Wells Fargo without a good understanding of not only where the technology capabilities are, but where it is likely to go? 

On the other hand, if you're a CIO in one of these companies, can you participate in business discussions without a deep understanding of where the business is going? The technology strategy, the HR strategy (what we call the social architecture), and the business strategy are facets of one in the same. You can't do one without the other. So, how we start seeing the three sides of the same problem using different lens, but recognizing it's the same thing we're looking at and describing.

EL. What's the most important requirement a company needs in order to innovate?

CP. You can't innovate unless you have a point of view. N=1, which says companies must co-create value with each customer individually, and R=G, which says that access to global resources is a key factor in continuous innovation, are points of view.  It's very simple. You can draw a simple decision tree if you agree that convergence, connectivity, social networks, and digitization are taking place. If you deny all of them, which is totally factual, you can't dispute the existence of an installed base of three billion cell phones. We can argue that it's 2.9 billion or 3.1 billion. With digitization the cost goes down. That's a fact. If you say yes, then you ask an interesting question:  Will the natural relationship between the consumer and the form change or not change? That's where the dispute is. If the answer is yes, it has to change. If so, then you look at what I call the new age companies, such as google and ebay, and Netflix. These companies didn't have to start with legacy. They could go right to N=1 and R=G, directly.

The second question is this: Can the same transformation take place in traditional business which has a 100-year history? That's why we took the cautious approach in the first chapter to avoid talking about companies such as google. If we did, readers would dismiss it and say but my industry makes tires or provides insurance. Instead, this chapter talks about what a Goodyear or Bridgestone can do to change its business model.

We need to do to develop a point of view and then say, 'If that is the point of view, than how does the role of the CIO change?' If CIOs stay on the same path, you'll see them wallowing in the same activities - a little more efficiency here, and a little more reorganization there. 

EL. Many companies talk about innovation, but how many really understand what it is?

CP. Many people talk about innovation, but few really have a deep understanding about how it works. To understand innovation, you need to do a lot of blocking and tackling about how things work at the ground level. People easily forget that innovation at the ground level is very different. If you're in a large company, you can create any type of strategic idea. On the other hand, if you want to make it happen, you still have to figure out the business model and business processes.

EL. Aren't a company's businesses processes apparent to managers?

CP. Business processes can easily get lost in most large companies. They become orphans without anyone to take of them. Here's an interesting example. Look at order to cash which cuts across so many processes. Ask 10 business managers from random companies to write down how the order to cash process works in their company or in their business. If you can get anyone to give you an 80 percent accurate answer, then give the person a metal. y deserve a metal. I don't know too many people who can do this. This functions if delegated deep down in the organization. No one pays attention to how it works. 

Look at all of the big problems Sony has always had. Sony couldn't change its business model and didn't understand how to do micro billing. Likewise, Napster didn't understand how to do it either. Napster built the business for ITIL, but drove out the business model and micro billing.  It's a business model innovation resulting in a business process innovation, or it's a business process innovation allowing them to a business model innovation. That's how simple it is at one level and how complicated it is at another level.

Author: Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a technology writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.

Play Podcast (Right click to download) - Part 2

In an effort to bring a consistent message about open source to customers and to partners, and to participate more actively in the open source community, BMC in 2007 hired William Hurley (aka whurley), an open source activist, inventor, and chairman of the Open Management Consortium, a non-profit organization advancing the adoption, development, and integration of open source systems management.

Whurley's role as chief architect of open source strategy has many facets to it. BMC's executives depend on guidance for anything that has to do with open source. Whurley contributes to the company's open source strategy, as well as carries it out. As an evangelist, he is the BMC open source voice at IT venues. He manages BMC's presence in the open source community by getting customers involved with it. In fact, management has encouraged whurley to maintain all of his open source community connections.

In this second of two podcasts, whurley, without mincing words, talks about a meeting that he and 30 other open source illuminaries had at Microsoft to discuss that company's position on openness. Whurley talks about what he observed at that meeting. He also discusses his challenge of mantaining the balance between BMC's marketing efforts and the involvement of BMC customers in helping to develop products that will leverage open source.

Bio
William Hurley is the chief architect of open source strategy at BMC Software, Inc. Also known as whurley, he is responsible for creating BMC's open source agenda and overseeing the company's participation in various free and open source software communities to advance the adoption and integration of BSM solutions. A technology visionary and holder of 11 important patents, whurley brings 16 years of experience in developing groundbreaking technology. He is the chairman of the Open Management Consortium, a non-profit organization advancing the adoption, development, and integration of open source systems management. Named an IBM Master Inventor, whurley has received numerous awards including an IBM Pervasive Computing Award and Apple Computer Design Award.

Resources
Computerworld - William Hurley Talks Up Open Source
Talk BMC podcasts with William Hurley
Seven Reasons Microsoft Loves Linux - By William Hurley

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
AlarmMusic.com Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production

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Procter & Gamble turned to social media, not soap operas, to really connect to its customers. The Vocalpoint P&G community enlisted 850,000 stay-at-home moms to create new products and new services, such as Dawn Direct Foam.

Barry Libert, a social media visionary and the founder of Shared Insights (now Mzinga), knows how to use technology to harness the power of what he calls the crowd. Mzinga provides software as a service solutions for online communities. It currently manages about 14,000 communities, and services more than one billion monthly page requests from 27 million users in 160 countries worldwide. Libert is currently chairman of the board of Mzinga. He and his co-authors set up a community and enlisted members to contribute to a book called, We are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business. In fact, this is the first book on the subject that actually used an online community, based on a Web 2.0 technology from Mzinga, to help create the book. About 4,000 qualified members joined the online community and helped shape the final product. By using the same social networking tools and techniques that their book covers, Libert and his co-authors could provide practical and unique look at online community building.

He says that building communities isn't all about tools and technologies. "The task requires good facilitation, moderation, and services that go along with them. Remember, people at ebay and amazon make sure their respective communities work. You need a community manager. The same goes for customer communities and employee communities. Mzinga is the online equivalent to the community Sherpa."

In this podcast, Libert talks about the power of communities, the differences between the community and business, and the changes businesses must make if they want to build communities. Now let's join Barry Libert, author and chairman of the board of Mzinga.

Bio
Before founding Shared Insights, Libert was a senior partner at Arthur Andersen and John Hancock. He began his career with McKinsey & Company. He has also co-founded and sold two successful businesses. He graduated from Tufts University and has an MBA from Columbia University.

Resources
FT Press - If We Build It, We Will Come
Safari Books Online - Interview with Barry Libert
One Degree - Interview with Barry Libert

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
AlarmMusic.com Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production