Break down the barriers with Inner Sourcing | Henrik Løvborg

Thank you. So, yes, I'm Henrik, and I'm here to talk to you - about something that will apply to most of what we've heard today - because it's a simple tool that will allow you to increase collaboration - and break down those silos that Rasmus was talking about. And you can even start using it while you're building that revolution - against the CEO until you actually convince them that this is the way. I work for Red Hat. I lead the solution architect team, - and we are the biggest enterprise open-source software company. And of course, that means that open-source is very special to us. It has a lot of benefits. It is software defined by having open-source making it accessible, - and depending on the license, - it is somewhat free to redistribute and even modify. The core principles around this are, well, some of them, - transparency and meritocracy and collaboration. And the reasons you want to be looking into open source basically, or ideally, - is that a lot of great things have come out of it. So, for one, Kubernetes is the most recent, I think, - biggest success, open-sourced about 10 years ago. And now under CNCF, it is governing more than 200 projects, - making people collaborate all across the globe. Other than that, transparency, - making sure that you can actually see what's happening in the source code. Also, collaboration over standards. So, actually seeing standards as an enabler and not a straitjacket, - making it more efficient to work on, making it more loosely coupled, - so that you can actually switch components out, - or you can work with multiple different components in your architecture. And then, just the basis of shared problems are solved faster. So, open source is something that you don't only apply to source code. I think this is a big thing. I would highly encourage you - to go and take a look at the Open Practice Library. It's an open-source space for collaboration tools, for agile tools. So, there are so many tools there from icebreakers to value stream mapping - to all the things that we can benefit from - when working agile in one methodology or another. And it's freely available there as well. So, moving on to Inner Source, which was in the title, - and which is what you would then be doing - if you're not able to open source, maybe because of secrets, - maybe because you don't think it's relevant for the world to know, - but that would be taking open source principles - and then applying to your proprietary development. So, it takes inspiration from the open-source principles. So, still openness and all of that - is going to be at heart of the Inner Sourcing - and then applies it to your own code. And it will give you the benefits of increased innovation. So, imagine a software engineer sitting working in a streamlined team. He has some sort of solution as part of developing a feature, - but something that would be beneficial - to any other team, basically, in the house. We see a lot of software companies - aligning into tribes or similar structures, - where there's basically a lot of reinvention. There's a lot of similarity to the problems, could be compliance, - it could be just scaffolding with golden path templates and stuff like that. But having that solution and no good place to put it, - is where Inner Source really comes into play - because that enables all of the structure of that contribution. So, you're not ending up with creating a ServiceNow ticket - or doing something similar, writing emails - and figure out who actually needs to take ownership of this. But you have established a way of doing this. Benefits also include efficiency boosts, time to market, and efficiency. But my favourite one really is about staff morale. So, imagine having an idea, and you have nowhere to put it. That's really, I think, one of the biggest things to think about. And making sure that you have a sense of meaning - by having somewhere to put that idea - is something that will greatly benefit staff morale. So, finally, there are a lot of principles - that fit into or inspired the Inner Sourcing. And there are a lot of details around - the open source versus inner source that you could be looking for. But basically, when you want to go and adopt the inner source, - you're going to be looking to seed the product, find the stakeholders, - and make sure you promote it, you're going to be looking - at tools that will create transparency, - and [chuckle] your organisation [applause] - needs to support it and talk about meritocracy. Thank you. [outro music] [music ends]