Open Source Solutions

Open Source: Leveraging the Capabilities to Drive Consumer Product Innovation by Marc West, SVP & CIO of H&R Block, Inc. Marc states that he'll not have the passion of Matt and Matthew, but his customers are open source's customers, and he brings the innovation of open source to their customers.

As Marc was told as a young programmer... it's about the customers, shareholders, stakeholders, and your fellow employees.

More than 10 years ago, if you wanted information you went to a training class, now you go to your peers via the Internet.

Niche is good, but scale is critical.

Marc states that we are now in our third generation of driving core technology changes and have not yet fully delivered on the value that "technology" has long pormised to bring.

Marc has a very interesting slide on how the F500 view Open Source...

Brigh Shiny Objects: "newest is not always best, neither is most mature. It's the mix of the best that wins. Without standards you will fail, because you will create a middle layer that you cannot unwind. H&R Block has used open source to make fundamental CHANGES in how they serve their customer. Marc then gave some context on H&R Block. Large market, competitive and highly regulated. They open 10,000 of their 13,000 offices and hire about 100,000 additional seasonal employees for TAX SEASON, with training and retraining to keep up with regulatory changes that happen every year, often at the last minute, which requires rebuilding their systems to match those changes... while serving customers. They make about half of their annual revenue in 12 days, near the beginning of February.

H&R Block is innovating for consumers, using mostly open source or [in-house] open sourced solutions.

• Organizit: web product using Lazlo but store your data online or on your desktop, 10 weeks to design, build, launch with over 2 million copies in distribution through download or CD.
• Tango: helping understand what you're doing when filling out your taxes, not just filling out boxes. An emotionally designed product, using Hollywood producers and consumers. Without open source, this product would never had happened. Five months to build.
• Zimbra: email, think about rolling out and rolling back all those email accounts for those 100,000 seasonal employees
• Vpro: virtual [tax] professional is a new platform to connect the consumers with tax professionals real time; eight months using multiple open souce components integrated into a simple platform that provides the right expert; a key part to "Taxes your way" and accounting your way.

Marc went into all the things that H&R Block learned, some of which are somewhat obvious, like open source still needing support, and some are less obvious, like the value of SCRUM, getting standards right, and that open source is a viable option for them. Within five years, the key Open Source components will be in the same place as UNIX was in the late 1990's; SasS will get it right and applications/computing in bite-sized chunks, on-demand, will be usable and trusted; the shift towards I creation over writing interesting code - different pipelines to manage; innovation pipeline continues to get compressed through features/competition and ubiquitous access; global teams are required to make it all work - talent is critical. Another interesting point that Marc brought up, is that there is more computing power for less dollars - do we know how to use it?

Open Source is not about saving money, it's about performance and flexibility. So says Marc, so say we all.