Maybe WS provides a common language for open innovation at the IS/IT level

One of the daddies of documenting what Open Source is, wrote this back in 2003:

Hacking and Refactoring: "we can imagine a hacker culture speaking a common tongue other than Unix and C (in the far past its common tongue was Lisp), and we can imagine an explicit ideology of open source developing within a cultural and technical context other than Unix (as indeed nearly happened several different times)."

Possibly today, that time is comming, the common language and context may be here for business heads to use. The future of hacking may be with the business bods, working with shared business concepts and using the tools of IS/IT to evolve open, shared, trusted working systems. The solution to the personal problem of one business head could easily emulate successful open source projects if the problem is wide spread, the technology easily accessible and the context easily adaptable.

The key enabler is a shared language, BPEL, ebXML, Web services, WSDL and the WS-* stack can provide the shared framework. Open Innovation can provide the strategic initiative and Open Source can provide the historical background from which to learn.

While hackery is still treated as a craft and will remain so in many domains, the new craft is business agility, way up the software stack and closer to the fully evolved practioner. Where the business process is a mundane, day to day or regulatory task, it makes sense to share the burden of keeping the process up to date using the open source, community paradigm.
A shared solution will induce better understanding, foster alliances and increase buying power. Technology has its place as a contributor to strategic advantage, but it also has its place as a commodity tool that serves a business function in an stable, evolving and proven fashion. Open initiatives are the path to facilitate this distinction and implement the latter.