This exploratory mode reminds me of what venture capitalist and former Oracle executive Ray Lane said in the Software 2006 keynote (http://www.infoworld.com/4159) I mentioned two weeks ago. In his vision of the future of enterprise software, services are delivered on demand, they produce value in incremental steps, and they're paid for when -- not before -- that value is proven.

But there's more to the story. The question isn't simply whether to build, buy, or lease, but more broadly how to orchestrate the use of a variety of free and commercial software. That's a core competency you'll want to retain and nurture in-house. What will make that possible is software that's not only delivered mostly through the Web but also packaged as what MIT's Eric von Hippel calls a "user innovation toolkit (http://www.infoworld.com/4160)."

The UMW instructional technologists regard their sandbox as an emergent example of such a toolkit. They're using it not only to craft open source solutions but also to transform themselves into more capable evaluators of the next commercial packages they'll need to buy from vendors. And, more than incidentally, they are having a great deal of fun.