Then, Look Outside Your Enterprise
One of those projects was Washtenaw's wireless initiative. Like most transformative innovation, the idea came from outside. In fact, it came over a cup of coffee Behen had with a local software entrepreneur. Roughly two-thirds of the county did not have broadband access, and telecom companies weren't likely to cover much more of its 1865 square kilometres. The Ann Arbor area had value for vendors, but there was no ROI for them in the more rural, western area. Behen left convinced the county should offer wireless to all. He began talking to stakeholders inside and outside of government. Within 18 months, he had worked a deal with a local contractor to trade free wireless connectivity for access to municipal and county assets on which to place their broadcast equipment. The county board of commissioners gave its blessing, and the project was under way.
Kellen's idea to move DePaul to a Web-services environment also came from looking outside — in this case, to vendors.
"Distributed computing historically has been difficult," Kellen says. "Web services promised to make it much simpler, which would mean IT agility and nimbleness." In 2003, there was little movement toward SOA in university environments. But Kellen, a former Internet consultant, knew software vendors were investing in the technology. "If that's what they're spending R&D on, that's what the future is going to look like," he says. "It was a no-brainer."
DePaul is now one of the leaders in the use of Web services in higher education. Says Kellen, "We're insisting on it for everything." SOA itself is opaque to university leaders, but they like the results. "They want us to get their work done," says Kellen. "And we're doing that faster."
Looking outside his enterprise also worked for Scott Sullivan, vice president of information technology and services for Pitt Ohio Express. He got a call from his boss, the owner of the private $US244 million less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier, who wanted Sullivan to explore mobile computing and figure out how it would fit into Pitt Ohio's business. Sullivan looked outside trucking to what was going on in the parcel delivery space. "FedEx and UPS give their customers real-time status of their deliveries," he says. "We wanted to apply that to the LTL industry." The PeopleNet effort, begun within Pitt Ohio's IT business systems group, didn't stay there for long. Now, Sullivan says, "We're breaking down paradigms. We're one of the few in this industry able to track where a shipment is at any given time within the supply chain."
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