Best International Practices of OSS Utilization in the Public Sector

3.2.2 Results and Findings

A detailed list and benefits to be gained as well as challenges faced from a number of countries that have carried out large scale OSS implementation projects are found in “Output 4 - Best International Practices” report.

Different countries have triggered OSS initiatives and developed respective strategies for different reasons corresponding to different strategic advantages of OSS mentioned in . This is due to the fact that every country’s circumstances are different. Some examples of these different driving forces for establishment of OSS are:

• 
  Reducing imports and investing in developing local capacities were the driving force in countries such as Slovenia, Malta, Russia, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, but also in many case studies in Germany.
  
• 
  Increasing the security of the national ICT infrastructure and protecting the privacy of the government data was a driving force in China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea.
  

• 
  Reduction of copyright infringement was the main driving force in Vietnam as a means to facilitate that country’s negotiations in trade agreements with the US and in entering the World Trade Organization.
  
• 
  Increased access to powerful yet localized ICT applications was the motivation for Iceland and South-Pacific to start OSS initiatives.
  

The reviewed case studies about the migrations from Windows/Office to Linux/OpenOffice conducted at the French Gendarmerie, the city of Munich and the Swedish police, demonstrate that OSS is a viable alternative for large-scale deployment in the desktops of the public administration with a lot of advantages. Both the city of Munich and the French Gendarmerie (two of the three biggest migration projects in Europe) have seen dramatic drops in the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their IT environments. Officials of the city of Munich report that the LiMux project has saved around 11 million Euros per year. Representatives of the French Gendarmerie report that the migration has saved them €2 million per year. Both projects also report improvements on quality of the solutions, ease of maintenance and abundance of available OS applications with very good interoperability that respect open standards. The LiMux project clearly demonstrates how OSS helps the local industry, since 95% of the contracts in the context of the project went to local SMEs. The French Gendarmerie case study demonstrates that the support question is not a real issue, as there are sufficient companies that offer support services, such as Canonical, an Ubuntu support provider.

However, the case studies, especially the most detailed one - the LiMux project of the city of Munich - also clearly indicates that deploying open source to the public administration does not mean “out-of-the-box” and a “free lunch”. The LiMuX project took almost 10 years from inception to being fully operational. It required several carefully conducted studies and consulting as well as development project involving consulting and development companies. Also the data available about the OSS project at the Swedish police indicate that the project, although well planned and carefully conducted, is already over time and it seems to take up a good amount of the IT budget of the police. However, when considering these facts from the Albanian perspective, one has to consider that the size of any similar project in Albania would be by far much smaller in terms of equipment volumes than the case studies at hand (e.g., 85,000 PCs across 4,500 police stations in the French Gendarmerie case study). Nevertheless, a careful analysis of the functionality, use and end user experience might be carefully conducted to ensure an effective, operational and maintainable solution.

As indicated in the Output 4 report, OSS has its cost and it is important that the decision makers become aware that probably the biggest benefit of OSS adoption is the independence from vendors lock-in. The cost reduction represents another driving force for taking migration decisions. But either way, the OSS implementation benefits are taken in medium to long-term period rather than in short-term.

3.2.3 Conclusions

Overall, the main learned lesson shows that that OSS carries a great potential for the Albanian public administration that goes beyond the mere potential of reducing the cost of IT.

However, there are also significant challenges related to the usage of OSS that need to be addressed properly, including establishment of the right policies, personnel training, OSS ecosystem creation in the Albanian IT market, careful integration with the existing IT environment and so on.

Finally, the decision makers should be aware that deploying OSS is not for free. While the cost for licenses can drop significantly, costs for packaging, deployment and maintenance remain. At the end, the decision makers should consider a move to OSS as long-term investment, which needs to be planned carefully, with a great potential on return on investment. The method of choice in enrolling an OSS initiative would be to follow an agile and iterative process. The successful case studies were all conducted in well-defined iterations, during which only a small amount of the overall infrastructure was migrated, from which lessons were derived for the next iterations.

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