Adopting Open Source Software

by Brian Fitzgerald, Jay P Kesan, Barbara Russo

Government agencies and public organizations often consider adopting open source software (OSS) for reasons of transparency, cost, citizen access, and greater efficiency in communication and delivering services. Adopting Open Source Software offers five richly detailed real-world case studies of OSS adoption by public organizations. The authors analyze the cases and develop an overarching, conceptual framework to clarify the various enablers and inhibitors of OSS adoption in the public sector. The book provides a useful resource for policymakers, practitioners, and academics.The five cases of OSS adoption include a hospital in Ireland; an IT consortium serving all the municipalities of the province of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy; schools and public offices in the Extremadura region of Spain; the Massachusetts state government's open standards policy in the United States; and the ICT department of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. The book provides a comparative analysis of these cases around the issues of motivation, strategies, technologies, economic and social aspects, and the implications for theory and practice.

Contents

Introduction

1. Background and Definitions
2. A Framework for Investigating OSS Adoption
3. Hibernia Hospital
4. Südtiroler Gemeindenverband
5. FUNDECYT in Extremadura
6. Adoption of Open Standards in Massachusetts
7. The Italian Chamber of Deputies
8. Comparing the Case Studies

Notes
References
Index

187 pages, ebook

First published September 23, 2011

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Brian Fitzgerald - Illustrator

Reviews

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book’s subtitle is particularly misleading, since this is not a practical guide. At the very least, the subtitle should make it clear that the authors present and compare a handful of case studies of Open Source Software (OSS) adoption by government agencies and public organizations. It only in the last chapter that the authors belatedly state what the book is about:

This book represents the first in-depth analysis of case studies of secondary adoption of OSS in public administrations.

What they never state in as many words is that the five cases focus, although not exclusively, on a very specific kind of adoption -migration to OpenOffice. As a first aside, it probably worth mentioning that the book was written just before OpenOffice forked into LibreOffice in 2011, so at the time of the case studies there was no OSS alternative to OpenOffice.

I have participated in at least two OSS migration efforts at a public Venezuelan university -or maybe it is more properly described as participation in one long and agonizing ongoing migration effort triggered by the Venezuelan government’s 2004 decree mandating all public administration bodies (including universities) to migrate to OSS and open standards:

“Artículo 1. La Administración Pública Nacional empleará prioritariamente Software Libre desarrollado con Estándares Abiertos, en sus sistemas, proyectos y servicios informáticos. A tales fines, todos los órganos y entes de la Administración Pública Nacional iniciarán los procesos de migración gradual y progresiva de éstos hacia el Software Libre desarrollado con Estándares Abiertos”.

To be honest, this book does not strike me as outstanding, even by 2011 standards. Perhaps part of the problem is the amount of attention given to migrating to OpenOffice -all five case studies focus on this and perfunctorily mention other kinds of OSS -an email platform (1 case), backend server and network infrastructure OSS (2 cases), groupware (2 case studies), OSS for information retrieval (1 case study). Another part of the problem is that, for an area which has seen such rapid evolution and change, the case studies are old -with the exception of the last case study whose main effort takes place in 2006-2008, the main adoption effort of the other four cases takes places roughly between 2002 and 2005. The case studies typically mention some preliminary OSS work, typically in adopting Linux or basic network infrastructure OSS, then study the main 2-3 year adoption effort (typically migration to OpenOffice), and wind up mentioning a follow-up study that reports the number or percentage of OpenOffice adoptions or use two or three years later.

The authors warn that they are basically interested in secondary adoption

...which refers to the actual adoption and use by individuals throughout the organization.

as opposed to primary adoption

...in which the decision is made at the strategic level that compromises evaluation and selection.

Thus the authors are really interested in what happens after strategic management has announced it is going to adopt an OSS.

The authors provide a framework, presented in chapter 2 with which to structure the key factors for secondary adoption:

1. Managerial intervention, defined by “...actions taken and resources made available by management for the purpose of expediting secondary adoption”. Particular attention is paid to whether usage of the OSS is made mandatory or voluntary, how much training and support is provided, and how and by whom the OSS initiative is championed.

2. Subjective norms, “…which concern how individuals believe their peers and coworkers expect them to behave in relation to technology”. This factor is applied quite fuzzily in the case studies.

3. Facilitating conditions, which follows Rogers classic 2003 book on diffusing innovations into by looking at user perceptions about:

- The relative advantage of the OSS as regards its precursor,
- Its compatibility with existing norms and personnel’s work habits,
- How complicated it is to understand and use (complexity,
- The degree to which it is possible to experiment with the OSS (for which the authors use the rather ugly term trialability); unfortunately the authors do not use this term consistently (in a sense all OSS is trialable, the quid of the matter is whether and how the future users can try out the system), and
- The degree to which the advantages (if any) of using the OSS are visible to others (Observability)

4. Organizational attributes, which include general organizational attitude to risk, IT governance policies and software standards, and absorptive capacity -the latter “...refers to an organization’s ability to recognize the value of new information, absorb it, and subsequently leverage it productively.” In the case studies, the authors make very little effort to report on IT governance policies and I felt the authors used absorptive capacity inconsistently and confusingly -sometimes it seems to used redundantly as a synonymous to training opportunities

I found the framework weak and many of its key items -such as subjective norms, trialability, observability, absorptive capacity- vague, unclear, and applied rather inconsistently throughout the case studies. Some of the framework’s items -compatibility, complexity (or are they rolled up into image?), trialability, general organizational attitude to risk, IT governance policies and software standards-, don’t even make it into the last chapter’s case studies comparison table. Some of the factors which do make it into the table -subjective norms, and observability- don’t lead to an entry in the “lessons for practice” column of the table.

The first case study which looks at the unsuccessful adoption of a preliminary version of OpenOffice at Hibernia Hospital in Ireland, reminds me a lot of my first organizational experience at migrating to OpenOffice, which was also unsuccessful. We thought OpenOffice would sell itself, provided almost no training since we considered OpenOffice was not that different from Office), and provided nominal support staff. We ran into problems with the Spanish language version of Writer, failed to print certain Writer and Calc documents, found, to our chagrin and disbelief, that Calc could not accommodate the size of our spreadsheets (which were not really all that big) and that presentations developed in Impress broke down every which way. In the end we simply gave up on OpenOffice and rolled back to Office -recommending the migration be postponed until the IT staff could provide more support on problems cropping up in real life examples and not toy examples.

In spite of all my previous criticisms, the case studies are interesting and provide important and still pertinent lessons as regards the importance of visible and real management commitments, user and staff motivation, championing, proper training and support, and taking into account all stakeholders -in this respect, the case study on the adoption of open standards in Massachusetts and management’s failure to listen to staff members with disabilities difficulties in using OpenOffice at the time is particularly instructive. In my personal opinion, the Venezuelan public administration has not made much headway in adopting OSS because it insists on adoption by fiat, and on grossly underfunding preparation, training and support for adoption initiatives -mistakes which have been clearly visible since at least 2005 and which the authors of this book elegantly hammer home. For example in the Massachusetts case study, the authors mention that the estimated financial savings provided to bolster the migration to OpenOffice were overestimated -a pity they don't provide more details or a reference on this- , and in the last chapter they claim, following a 2004 paper by J. Stoller (Open Source: Assesing the TCO Picture), that:

Total cost of ownership is often higher in the short run, due in part to training costs, costs related to software services, and legacy costs. The reduced costs that OSScan offer an organization are usually only possible in the long run. In the short run, the costs of training, adoption of new systems, and hiring of an in-house team or third party to maintain the software are not very different for OSS and proprietary software. However, in the lun run, lower licensing costs become increasingly significant, and the adopting organization can find OSS adoption to be efficient and productive.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that quite a bit of research on OSS adoption has been carried out which the interested reader should probably find it worth her while to hunt out. For example, just to reference an example close to home, the Universidad Simón Bolívar’s Laboratorio de Investigación en Sistemas de Información research group has worked on and published systemic models of software quality and OSS critical success factors for over ten years and have come up with, far more interesting and precise frameworks which they tailor to specific application areas. Thus a 2015 M. Sc. thesis has proposed and validated a set of 14 critical success factors for the adoption of OSS Learning Management Systems:

1. Management commitment;
2. OSS implementation planning;
3. Support by external consultants;
4. Technology management;
5. Implementation staff’s level of technical expertise;
6. Support and maintenance staff’s level of technical expertise;
7. OSS selection process;
8. Requirements analysis;
9. OSS test process,
10. OSS adoption kickoff;
11. Interoperability;
12. User accesibility;
13. OSS packaging,
14. Tecnological infrastructure.

In another recent (2016) and relevant M. Sc. Thesis tutored by the late Prof. Kenyer Domínguez, critical success factors for e-government are proposed and validated.

[Anton Antonov · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is an extremely chaotic and hard-to-utilize book. It's far from pragmatic. It reads more like a cult letter at times.

I read it when I wanted to introduce open-sourcing to a company. While I did succeed with the help of others and open-sourced a few projects, I can't really attribute much of that success to this book. Or any?

This one you can skip reading.