【正文】 ve is this: ensure you have a robust munity to support your efforts. Historically, successful open source environments have had a substantial munity supporting those technologies. For example, has a huge munity of developers, not only providing enhancements to the code base, but actually providing support. Not all open source products share robust munities like Apache. Without it, you cannot rely on the munity to deliver new functionality and enhancements to the technology, or to provide support. Consequently, when the server goes down at 3 in the morning, who are you going to call? In some cases you can acquire mercially supported open source technology, and in those cases, you are going to call the pany you bought it from. One of the benefits of open source is that you do not pay a license fee for the technology, and as long as you abide by the usage terms, you can use that technology pretty much anywhere you want and not worry about per user or per CPU licenses. However, if you buy a mercial open source technology, you are paying a license fee. You have to look at free open source vs. mercial open source vs. mercial proprietary technologies, then decide which makes the most sense for you. One final thought about open source – open source is neither buy nor build. You are getting a set of code that functions, but you are getting source code. Be aware that you are not necessarily buying a pletely packaged solution. There may be some new code that your developers choose to develop because they have the source code and, therefore, have the ability to modify or extend it. Remember, developers just love to cut code! That is a good news / bad news story, because building things like infrastructure ponents is not necessarily the best way to spend your expensive developer dollar. 8. How does web selfservice benefit the enterprise? What are some examples of cost savings and enterprise efficiencies created by web selfservice? Selfservice has had a significant impact in many enterprises, most recently, as part of many enterprise portal deployments. Anywhere there are paperbased or peoplebased processes, where one human interacts with another human in order to consummate a transaction, there exists the opportunity to employ selfservice. This is especially true where the first human fills out a form, whether it is an online form or paperbased, then has to get that information to another human, who then transcribes it into a system. From a business perspective, the impact of selfservice is reduction in the levels of back office and call center staff. A lot of back office staff39。s are being held accountable if a projected ROI is not actually realized. To build a business case with pragmatic, measurable, realizable ROI, there are several areas on which to focus. Number one, as mentioned earlier, is the impact of selfservice, which can be substantial. Solutions that eliminate five headcount in the call center or ten headcount in the accounting back office turn into real dollars, a measurable benefit that you can actually realize in managing your organization. Number two is the impact of a targeted set of applications, ex., automating the sales force. Now you can look at not only the productivity of your salespeople, but also the increased number of calls, time spent with clients, and resulting increase in sales. Third, you have to put these potential projects in business terms as much as possible in order to be able to prioritize against other potential projects and to measure and realize the true value of these kinds of applications. Look at your key business processes and how they are done today. Estimate the impact of the application of a portal, content tool, or of a particular application to those processes. Then, after you apply that technology, e back and measure it. See if you really were able to realize that impact in terms of people, dollars, revenue, or market share. Put it in business terms. If it is not in business terms, you really cannot understand the true value of the application of those solutions and technologies. Finally, look for a lot of small wins. Enterprises cannot deal with multiyear projects anymore. Enterprises are looking for a quicker hit, quicker return on investment, a lot of small wins as opposed to the one big win. 10. To wrap up, what are your top three survival tips for CIO39。t just toss that away. Find a way to leverage things of value in those investments, and extend those legacy investments through the use of service oriented approaches and web services. Create posite applications and acquire packaged posite applications that can drop in as gap apps. Allow a broader set of people to participate in development methodologies and mechanisms, ex., allow business analysts to get in and reengineer business processes. We are not talking about a clean slate, but a very busy slate where you can move things around with agility and reassemble things creatively and very quickly. 2. Focus on endtoend processes and enabling and managing those endtoend processes. Look at the high value, high impact processes that, with proper focus, can deliver high productivity and significant cycle time reduction. Look at those processes that are focused on customers and cu