Implement innersource to innovate

In recent years there has been an explosion of open source projects where software contributors embrace the community engagement approach in building software. The best practices and methodologies from open source can also be used in a corporate environment ‘surrounded’ by firewalls to drive innovation in digital banking. Enters innersource.

Collaboration feeds innovation

Most software engineers are motivated by cool technology, recognition, an opportunity for growth, opportunity to innovate, good projects, simplicity and working in a creative environment. The reality though is that most IT departments in big corporates are siloed – leaving engineers with few opportunities to cross-pollinate with different teams. Cross-pollination is what will help to realise the efficiencies that can be gained through innersourcing.

It is quite simple. The software is almost always better when teams collaborate. When leveraging talent from outside, one is likely to see more innovation, opportunities not bound by a single team. The innovation just keeps rolling.

Community over code

Innersourcing enables teams to contribute in an environment with a common vision, goals and tools. Everyone matching to the same direction in uniform technology pace. Individuals start to see where they fit in, and that in turn, opens opportunities to unlock natural talent.

The benefits of innersourcing are endless. On-boarding newbies will be a piece of cake given that tools and continuous integration environments are in place. One can test code and confidently contribute code without worrying about breaking the build and self-managing expectations on the quality of the code.

Innersourcing enables isolated teams to form a community within the corporate structure. The community builds loyalty and trust with self awareness, acknowledging and self identifying. The new community is bound by a culture of innovation and ubuntu, while being part of another team somewhere else in the broader organisation.

The community starts to adhere to good principles. When you look inside the proverbial kitchen, you realise that there is a great deal of transparency. Reuse becomes easy since you can reuse only what you see. Many inefficiencies are often hidden within projects. As more eyeballs move towards the code and designs, the quality significantly improves. Building software comes with great flexibility of tools without any vendor lock-ins and the cheaper costs benefit.

It pays to contribute

Individuals start to get merit from collaborating. The best technical employees start to bubble up. Their talents can be leveraged to mentor other people within the organisation and contributions are acknowledged and recognised by peers. The environment becomes very irresistible with such great exposure setting one free to write code in an innovative environment. This is the point where passion is in overdrive and contributing to projects becomes some form of a personal investment. What’s more, is that all the contributors can help to retain talent in the organisation.

Inner sourcing has the ability to enable developers to contribute to building tools to better lives even outside of the organisation. A good example is some of the ideas for Charity from FNB Codefest 2017 where contributors can happily spare some time on them. It can enable cross-functional engagements on decision making in software designs, architecture and tech radar. It also helps teams to stick to very high quality standards such as with trending projects on github.com.

Connectivity leads to extraordinary things

When people are connected they tend to do extraordinary things. Paypal, Walmart and Bloomberg already use innersourcing and they have some very interesting success stories to tell. It gave them a unique competitive advantage where they stay more relevant by adopting best practices and implementing change in their organisations.

Open source workflow of teams operates at an enormous scale in designing and implementing highly innovative products. There is no real face-to-face communication. When you really think about it, these kinds of efforts should not succeed given that there isn’t an organisation behind it. Yet, the community is loaded with good lessons that can teach us how to collaborate, contribute and manage large and complex projects within a large organisation.

References

https://github.com/paypal/InnerSourcePatterns

https://resources.github.com/articles/introduction-to-innersource/

https://www.recruityourninja.com/retain-software-engineers/

by: Simiso Zwane

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