Are You Ready To Share Code?
Michael Schrage has written an excellent editorial for CIO Magazine in which he encourages companies to share more with their customers and suppliers. Gifts that Keep on Giving explains how by giving away code, testing tools, frameworks and other similar tools companies are making their whole supply chains more efficient. Everyone wins when companies are willing to share more of their inner workings.
He’s not talking about code from your mission critical applications or tools that are used to differentiate your product offerings but rather the ones that are more informal and basic. The tools that employees have built themselves to make their jobs easier. Whether they are nifty pieces of code or excel macros, companies may derive greater value if they are willing to share them for free with their partners so that they too can benefit from the efficiences created.
In a nutshell, I see this as the future. Knowledge management will be less a function of the corporate boundaries within which an employee exchanges information but instead a necessity that extends beyond a company’s walls to the large ecosystem within which it functions. In other words, companies will win when their employees create knowledge communities with the outside world and share generously.
