I am often asked the question "what is your goal with/for CustomWare?" by customers and staff (both current and prospective) and my answer is as follows.

I'd love for CustomWare to do to the the IT Professional Services industry, what the open source movement did to the software market - and from that, I mean the following: IT Services have typically been (among other things) closed, proprietary, highly priced and non-customer centric. I think a lot of terrible things can and do happen, hidden behind a skilled project manager that can outfox a client. The client and vendor should be focussed on solving the business problem at hand, not on playing political games.

Services should be transparent, open, and aligned with the customer. When going about this task with our team, we looked at how the open source software model worked - the IP was set loose, and it was the service, the "ownership" and thought leadership that held the momentum. So with this, we decided to base our website on a wiki. 5 years later, we have over 1000 members from all over the world. It was wierd for some (and still is) but for us it feels natural. It is also inspiring to see some of the larger consulting firms also move into the "new thinking" direction of transparency.

Underneath what we call our Greenhouse strategy, and aligned with one of our company values - "Share the Knowledge" we maintain public WIKI's of FAQ's based upon some of the products that we work with - (you can find a list of them at http://wiki.customware.net]), we also open source many of the components that we develop, and offer them free of charge.

There is of course challenges in doing this as a services firm. We have many legal agreements with our customers that prevent us from disclosing information, so we have to work within those. So we respect those agreements and ensure that no "knowledge" is inappropriately placed or released.

In the age of "googling" for answers, sharing knowledge is key for Consulting 2.0, it's not about customer retention because you are the only one holding the knowledge - it is about customer retention because you provide the best service!

The best customer service is provided by employees and staff of a company, not sub-contractors. A company that only uses sub-contractors also is not as likely to contribute to the community, because it has to pay.

When picking your vendors, just like it has become standard for software vendors to contribute to community (code and knowledge) what do your services vendor(s) do?