Achieving the Tipping Point for Open-source Software: Making the Business Value Obvious for Upper Management

The importance of understanding business outcomes and project criticality when making technology recommendations, with a focus on open source software.

• Tying projects to business outcomes is crucial
• Understanding design principles and doing due diligence is important
• Examples of using open source software to reduce mean time to detection, improve security, and increase innovation
• Benefits of contributing to open source communities include professional growth and expanding the talent pool
• Empowering developers to find solutions and influence outcomes leads to better outcomes and an innovative brand perception

The speaker shared an anecdote about an executive whose mean time to detection had reached over 10 minutes due to the complexity of the data being processed. By recommending the use of open source software, the executive was able to reduce the mean time to detection and improve the company's security posture.

Cloud-native has been taking the world by storm. However, I'm only a recent convert, having begun my tech career by selling against open-source software. As I began working with more complex organizations and applications, I started to see areas where OSS actually became a critical component to delivering an overall solution. Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, has coined this as the "digital supply chain". And it makes sense, the advent of cloud-native development presented engineering teams with new challenges that many of their vendor-provided solutions just weren't prepared to overcome. Making matters worse, at many companies, management didn't have a grasp on the severity of this disconnect.This is where open-source came in to fill the gaps that were created. Open-source software consumption and participation was on a tremendous upswing even prior to the pandemic, with studies showing that 68% of companies planned to use more OSS than in the previous year. Additionally, Github found that at the start of the shelter-in-place lockdowns, individual users created 40% more open-source projects than in previous periods. In spite of these data points, you're still facing scrutiny and being asked to provide business justification when evaluating OSS as a possible solution for your technical challenges.This session will give you the inside scoop on how to position and align your OSS recommendation with business value so that all stakeholders hop on board. And for leaders, you'll see first-hand why OSS is preferrable in many instances, and a framework for how technology recommendations should be presented. As someone that has spent years convincing folks not to use OSS and then to definitely use it, I possess the real-world experience to show you what you're up against.