Dan Tynan wrote a great story in InfoWorld recently about Guerrilla IT and how to leverage it by empowering your super users and implementing ways for folks to collaborate and share best practices. I couldn't help but think how so many good innovations have snuck into IT through the back door, the side door and under the radar of what management officially approved. Consider in the early days that lots of CIOs d Dan Tynan wrote a great story in InfoWorld recently about Guerrilla IT and how to leverage it by empowering your super users and implementing ways for folks to collaborate and share best practices. I couldn’t help but think how so many good innovations have snuck into IT through the back door, the side door and under the radar of what management officially approved. Consider in the early days that lots of CIOs didn’t want to have to deal with PCs or Macintoshes. So departments just approved the expense themselves and that’s how killer apps like Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Aldus Pagemaker made inroads into organizations. Sooner or later, IT organizations realized they’d be better off supporting the rogue applications and PCs, rather than fighting them. I’ve been seeing the same thing in open source for the last couple of years. Just about every IT organization is running open source, whether it’s inrastructure Linux, Apache, MySQL or applications like Bugzilla, Alfresco, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, or Pentaho. Why? In part because it’s just plain easier to download software than it is to get permission. That’s the beauty of open source; you don’t need to engage with a sales rep or beg for a trial version. Just download and go. Not surprisingly, lots of people do exactly that. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz described a similar incident while on a sales call with a top CIO when he asked them about their use of MySQL. It made for an excellent blog posting and an interesting anecdote in his keynote at the MySQL Conference. I suspect this phenomena is wide spread. So one good step to encourage Guerrilla IT to be effective is to find out what open source software is running in your shop and why. And if it’s working, figure out what best practices you can encourage across other teams or departments. You’ll not only empower people, you’ll likely save some money in the process. Open Source