On Friday, March 14, 2003, at 01:52 PM, Puneet Kishor wrote:
I was looking for material on (justifying) Opensource.
One aspect of OSS advocacy that I've learned is the importance of knowing your audience. There's a lot of material out there, but what's more important than volume is relevance. If you bury your audience in a thousand arguments, they'll disregard you as a zealot. Instead, tailor your presentation to what they want to hear, and make a point they can understand.
If you're talking to the CTO, talk about the developmental benefits such as broad testing and free bug fixes. If you're talking to the CFO, focus on how the "free as in gratis" aspect of OSS will help cut costs. If you're talking to marketing or the CEO, emphasize how much goodwill can be generated by working with your customers, rather than treating them like numbers.
You can't ignore any of the benefits of using OSS, of course; you'll want to touch on them all. The key is to focus on the benefits that will directly touch on areas that your audience has a personal stake in. In a financially-focused presentation, for example, you might mention, almost in passing, that it will be easy to get support from the CTO because it'll make his job easier. Or the opposite - if you're presenting your pitch to the CTO, mention in passing that the CFO will be easy to convince because, in addition to everything you've already said, using OSS will also save money.
sherm--
Thus spake the master programmer:
"A well-written program is its own heaven; a poorly-written program is its own hell."
-- The Tao of Programming
