In an effort to bring a consistent message about open source to customers and to partners, and to participate more actively in the open source community, BMC in 2007 hired William Hurley (aka whurley), an open source activist, inventor, and chairman of the Open Management Consortium, a non-profit organization advancing the adoption, development, and integration of open source systems management.

Whurley's role as chief architect of open source strategy has many facets to it. BMC's executives depend on guidance for anything that has to do with open source. Whurley contributes to the company's open source strategy, as well as carries it out. As an evangelist, he is the BMC open source voice at IT venues. He manages BMC's presence in the open source community by getting customers involved with it. In fact, management has encouraged whurley to maintain all of his open source community connections.

In the second of two podcasts, whurley, without mincing words, talks about a meeting that he and 30 other open source illuminaries had at Microsoft to discuss that company's position on openness. Whurley talks about what he observed at that meeting. He also discusses his challenge of mantaining the balance between BMC's marketing efforts and the involvement of BMC customers in helping to develop products that will leverage open source.

Bio
William Hurley is the chief architect of open source strategy at BMC Software, Inc. Also known as whurley, he is responsible for creating BMC's open source agenda and overseeing the company's participation in various free and open source software communities to advance the adoption and integration of BSM solutions. A technology visionary and holder of 11 important patents, whurley brings 16 years of experience in developing groundbreaking technology. He is the chairman of the Open Management Consortium, a non-profit organization advancing the adoption, development, and integration of open source systems management. Named an IBM Master Inventor, whurley has received numerous awards including an IBM Pervasive Computing Award and Apple Computer Design Award.

Resources
Computerworld - William Hurley Talks Up Open Source
Talk BMC podcasts with William Hurley
Seven Reasons Microsoft Loves Linux - By William Hurley

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
AlarmMusic.com Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production

If you want to carry out a successful Six Sigma initiative, especially if it's applied to IT, you need to be aware of the challenges you face and to call on some experts. For example, internal IT groups need to first align the business solution with the business process; however, many IT people aren't trained in business process performance. To determine if customers will be happy with the products being developed, IT must move beyond counting errors in lines of code, to apply quality management to the product being developed. Moving to this level, however, is often hard for IT to do.

All of these observations come from Joe De Feo, CEO and executive coach at the Juran Institute, a quality management consulting firm funded by J. J. Juran, the founder of quality management. In this podcast, De Feo talks about how IT organizations and IT service companies can prepare for Six Sigma, and how organizations can correct what he says are the four common Six Sigma project mistakes. De Feo also dispels the myth that Six Sigma stifles innovation. Says De Feo, "Dr. Juran told executives that if they wanted to meet their customers' requirements, they always had to be planning for continuous improvement. You have to be thinking continuously about how to make the existing product better and to be planning for the next new product. Innovation doesn't just happen. It has structure, which is the design piece of Six Sigma."

Resources

Hospital  Performance Improvement through a Business Model

Juran  Institute's Six Sigma Breakthrough and Beyond

Juran Institute  Gives Advice for Getting Lean with Six Sigma

In  His 100th Year, Juran Still an Advocate for Quality

Bio

Joseph A. De Feo is president and executive coach at the Juran Institute. His areas of expertise include: coaching executives to understand key factors in driving enterprise-wide change programs, and developing and deploying breakthrough management principles like Lean and Six Sigma, strategic quality planning, and business process improvement. Mr. De Feo is the co-author of two books. Six Sigma Breakthrough and Beyond,  co-authored with the late Dr. William W. Barnard, and Quality Planning and  Analysis for Enterprise Quality, co-authored with the late Dr. Frank Gryna  and Dr. Richard Chua.

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Producer
Dana  Farver, Executive Producer, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom  Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host

Charlie Catlett has spent most of his career working with the country's most sophisticated supercomputers, as well as pioneering grid computing. On May 1, 2007, Catlett became CIO and division director of Argonne National Laboratory's Computing and Information Systems Division, a scientific research center funded by the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Office of Science and managed by the University of Chicago. Since 1990, Argonne has worked with more than 600 companies, many federal agencies, and other organizations in areas ranging from climatology to biotechnology.

His routine CIO responsibilities include managing the IT group that maintains the laboratory and business computing and scientific network infrastructure. Because of his technical background, Catlett also serves on the scientific computing leadership team, which is turning out plans and strategy for the Digital Laboratory. This new initiative takes a Web-services and a services-oriented-architecture approach to the information infrastructure.

The Digital Laboratory is based on the concept of adopting the technology to the user, not the other way around. In fact, the science gateway, which Catlett worked on before becoming CIO, mirrors this philosophy. Catlett also will continue to work with the TeraGrid Project in a strategic advisory role and as chairman of the TeraGrid leadership forum. TeraGrid is a $90 million National Science Foundation-funded project that is deploying 25 teraflops computational grid system integrating resources at Argonne, California Institute of Technology, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and other institutions. He most recently was director of the TeraGrid Project, which has about 4,000 users.

One of Catlett's upcoming projects is to buy a 3D Second Life island and host virtual training sessions for scientists. In fact, he is no stranger to the first-generation of Internet-based virtual worlds, called "multi-oriented objects (MOOs)" and "multi-user domains (MUDs)." The culture at Argonne, says Catlett, has evolved around using MOOs and MUDs for collaborating with colleagues. The advantage of collaboration in Second Life, says Catlett, is that everyone can see what you're doing – in real time.

Resources

The  ACM Digital Library

Presentation:  "TeraGrid Architecture"

Argonne National  Laboratory

Bio

Charlie Catlett is chief information officer at Argonne National Laboratory, director of the Computing and Information Systems Division, and a senior fellow in the Computation Institute at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago. From 2004-2007, he was director of the TeraGrid Project.

Prior to joining Argonne in 2000, Catlett was chief technology officer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He was part of the original team that established NCSA in 1985. His early work at NCSA included participation on the team that deployed and managed the NSFNet.

Catlett was the founding chair of the Global Grid Forum (now Open Grid Forum) from 1999 through 2004. While there, he designed and deployed one of the first regional optical networks dedicated to academic and research use. He has been involved in grid computing since the early 1990s, when he co-authored with Larry Smarr a seminal paper called "Metacomputing" in the Communications of the ACM, which outlined many of the high-level goals.

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Producer
Dana  Farver, Executive Producer, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom  Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host

Despite the downturn in the economy, some financial services companies are holding their own and hiring people, especially in areas such as IT. Genworth Financial is one of those companies. Genworth Financial has more than $103 billion in assets and 15 million customers worldwide. Genworth has earned the highest company ratings in its industry. It is a leader in long-term care insurance and annuities.

Christina Hollingsworth will be the first one to tell you that IT resides at the core of Genworth Financial's business operations. As corporate IT director at Genworth Financial, she oversees the strategy, planning, and execution of the company's enterprise finance technology acquisition and integration. Hollingsworth has earned a stellar reputation for leading global teams and initiatives and partnering with multiple suppliers.

Like many IT executives, Hollingsworth has to be sure that she has a well-stocked pool of qualified personnel who are not only technically savvy but can lead IT projects. She says, "In the past, IT professionals have been very good about executing on initiatives, or basically carrying out what they were told to do. Today, things have changed. Given the speed at which technology is evolving, we need people who can develop strategy based upon trends in the industry, can translate those trends into action, and then can execute on those initiatives."

In fact, Genworth Financial has deployed new technologies such as desktop video and software as a service, which manages travel expenses and investment portfolio expenses. The company also has a social networking pilot underway that is similar to Facebook. In fact, they call it Spacebook. Hollingsworth says, "As a global company, we have both employees and contractors working at a variety of locations. The best way to get good ideas is to have many ideas coming from our global talent pool. Our Spacebook will make it very easy for people to tap into these resources."

In this podcast, Hollingsworth talks about what skills people in IT need today, how recent IT graduates can chart a course for leveraging their skills, and what unemployed IT professionals need to think about when looking for a job. In addition, she also talks about Genworth Financial's career development program and the company's green initiatives.

Bio

Christina Hollingsworth is the corporate information technology director at Genworth Financial, where she has worked for seven years. The company recognized Hollingsworth's leadership skills by awarding her the 2005 Platinum Compass Award for excellence in performance execution. Before coming to Genworth Financial, she held technology leadership positions at Minerals Technology and GE Financial, before it became Genworth Financial. She has a Masters in the Management of Technology from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton Business School and Penn Engineering.

Resources

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer

Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Doug Marcis - Audio and Music Editing