Help Writing an Open Standards Policy? 52
Cornwallis writes "I'm trying to save money for a local government agency I work for by writing a policy statement to support the idea of adopting open data standards and/or Open Source software in order to contain IT expenses (by reducing licensing costs). I am thinking something along the lines of supporting open standards by not locking in to long term software contracts so that departments could be freed to adopt an alternative OS and/or desktop suite if this would work for the individual department. The idea is to unlock the stranglehold that proprietary software may have on the department IT budget. Have any of you written policy statements along these lines, and would you be willing to share? I'm not saying this would be for everybody, nor replace everything, just be an option to help my beleaguered agency in rough times."
Call me (Score:5, Informative)
Bruce
OK, I'll bite (Score:5, Informative)
So you want to encourage open-source adoption? OK, a laudable goal. The two things that you are going to have to deal with from an IT perspective are support and version control.
Who, exactly do departments deal with for support? Will the IT department be the front-line resource and then farm things out as needed? Or are individual departments going to be going it alone? More to the point, is the experience if departments such that they would prefer to "go it alone" today? If the departments are your customers and they have been treatd well, then the probably will expect the IT department to be providing first-line support for them - as well you should.
One big reason for providing first-line support is version control. While some open-source packages have well-defined versions (Ubuntu, for example), many others do not. There are patches here and there and different versions being distributed from different web sites. If you are assuming interoperability of software being used by different departments it is going to be up to someone to ensure that this is actually possible. Having departments select their own versions and installing them will not insure this at all. If it then falls upon you to sort this out at some later date, you are going to wish dearly that you had been proactive about it. Yes, this may mean being ratuer draconian about individual users downloading whatever they want, installing it and counting on IT to pick up the pieces.
I have seen this happen, even within a community of software developers.
There is a substantial manpower requirement for this, and it needs to be in IT, not in individual departments. You are proposing something that will save money, but some of that immediate savings in software licenses needs to be shifted over to an IT function for support and version control. Ignoring this is not a viable option because you will end up with everyone being unhappy and upper management putting an end to this "experiment". No matter how happy they were with the initial savings.
Sure, overall costs can be lower. But some of that apparent savings needs to be funneled back into keeping things sane and managed. Things like Office Update and Microsoft Office web sites for templates, add-ons and tools do this for Office users and it all just works. You will be replacing this with IT resources at a great savings but you can't ignore things like updates, version control and support issues.
Re:Don't call Bruce, call a lawyer! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Don't call Bruce, call a lawyer! (Score:5, Informative)
Policy is sort of a dual problem. Attorneys get involved on several levels. They want to make sure no laws are being broken in the policy, that there isn't a specific vendor proference (if we're lucky - some districts have no problem sending everything to a few preferred vendors) and that it's not going to be overly burdensome for vendors doing business with the locality.
But politicians also get involved, and that's where the big problems will be. The really important thing I bring to the table is experience in how other similar efforts have failed, and how to get around the problems that killed them.
Bruce