Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Open Source
I see that Iain Dale is touting a report by the Tories saying that government should use more open source software. Well I tried to suggest that to Barnet Council back in April 2007. See Here. Unfortunately I got short shrift. The main reason is that like many other local authorities Barnet has been trapped by the Microsoft juggernaut with very tempting deals. Of course that does mean that our data is tied up in proprietary and often undocumented formats. Anyway it's nice to see that the Tories are playing catch up yet again.
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I've argued this too but Mike Freer, who has run the IT portfolio right back to 2002, has always just followed the bureacrats at the Council and refused to take a lead. Too often, as you suggest, they get tied down in big deals with big companies. Most Officers have extremely expensive software that most won't properly use.
I'm still waiting for a Council in Barnet to implement sensible popular Cameron Conservative policies. I won't be holding my breath, on too many issues it seems to me Barnet Council is stuck in the 1980s.
Well there's something wrong in public service IT. I have a small company and bought my own laptop - cots £500 - my Sister in law has the same laptop for her public sector job cost £4,000.
I asked the council about open source software at the residents forum in September. This was their response:
The Council continues to track industry news on open source software on an ongoing basis. Comparative cost / benefit assessments between open source and commercial market products show that continuing with the commercial market products gives the best business outcome. The Council is in the process of refreshing the IT strategy and shall consider the viability of open source software as part of this process.
Has anyone seen a new IT strategy?
I don't think the tories are playing catch up here at all.
The lib dem party has zero, none, nada interest in technology unless it's facebook election campaigns.
When it comes to joined up policy on technology it's well behind the tories, nobody I've spoken to with any ability to do anything useful is at all interested in having a shadow minister for information/communications technology or a policy working group, or even any policy.
The tories have been flirting with this stuff at a high level for a while, anybody trying to bring it to the attention in our party gets the brush off - I've given up as it seems a complete waste of time.
I'm interested that the answer to your question was £21,000. As this represents the licence costs I'd be amazed if there weren't external annual support contract costs on top of that, the question appears to have been answered in the most narrow way possible.
The difficulty with any change (on desktop software) is down to the bundling and site licensing. Replacing all of the commercial software might not be cost effective unless you can get a critical mass of desktops and applications and not have (or the risk of) possible migration, training and staffing costs on top. You might say some of the bigger software companies almost base their pricing on this but the costs are fairly predictable, if some local authorities were to take a lead on this any risks would at least be better understood and you'd see more moving towards doing it.
Much more interesting is the Conservative report's focus on procurement of huge "specialist" systems and breaking them into a series of interoperable chunks and contracts, spending on desktop software almost pales in comparison with some IT system fiascos like Connecting for Health.
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