Open Source doesn't matter

I recently had the pleasure of presenting at the British Computer Society, as part of a panel discussion on the challenges of web and document management in the public sector, and the ways in which open source software might be suitable for addressing them. Given that my presentation only contained pictures, I’ve summarised the key points from my presentation below in lieu of uploading it.

The key message in the presentation was that Open Source doesn’t matter. To over-simplify the point, since when has being able to see the source code of an application been a key factor in deciding what platform to choose?

"I will be lucky" - expectations management in search

Enterprise Search. It's the holy grail for a lot of organisations, and yet very few have realised it. Why is that?

In the last few years, I've worked with a number of companies whose initial vision for their Enterprise Search is "like Google, but for our own organisation's data, including all that we've got on our laptops". Sounds wonderful, and certainly a great place to start as a vision (indeed, there's not really any further you could actually reach) - but when you start to think about some of the realities of achieving it within your company it becomes clear that a more practical initial vision might be needed, unless you are starting your search project by clicking the "I'm feeling lucky" button.