Open source software public report

4.1 Recommended Future research

We recommend that additional research be undertaken in the near future with the goal to build an effective long-term OSS strategy for Albania, at least for a time frame 2014-2020 compliant with the National ICT Strategy. The main areas of research are detailed in the remaining part of this section:

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  Evaluate the maturity of current open source use in few public sector institutions. Public sector institutions that have a larger OSS installation base will be targeted to further analyze their experience - especially in the areas of development, implementation, and maintenance - as well as identify potential reuse of their solutions as a whole or on specific components by other institutions.
  
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  Elaborate in further details the current utilization of OSS within public institutions – number of staff that use OSS application, purpose of use and especially evaluate the end user learning experience and their comfort level.
  
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  Study of the state of the art and of the potential expected savings from migration to using OSS
  
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    This survey describes the investments occurred in the last two years on software for various governmental agencies. In the study, every agency declares the use of the software resources in the peak and bottom capacity of their work. A thorough analysis of software resources used in a time unit would certainly give more clear evidences for the need to move the IT infrastructure to OSS solutions.
    
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    The survey should include an analysis of how much can the software investments decrease in a unit of time (e.g., 2 years) in case (some of) the IT services migrate to OSS solutions, including cloud. TCO can be used for the study. The survey can conclude by providing suggestions of how the savings can be invested in the IT sector in Albania in general and specifically in bootstrapping an OSS ecosystem in Albania.
    
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  Standards, Procurement, and Change Management. In addition to specific small-scale migration/introduction case studies, long-term strategies and policies need to be developed or adapted to guide real larger-scale introduction or migration projects. Lessons learned from small-scale case studies can be used as input to define policies.
  
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    Standards. State agencies should adopt common data standards to make data sharing between agencies easier, and they should prioritize operating on platforms that can easily communicate.
    
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    Procurement. The PPA (Agency of Public Procurement) needs to implement comparison tools to transparently compare OSS providers.
    
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    Managing change. As with any transition, migration incurs overhead. In addition, the adoption of openness requires better understanding of how solutions are designed, built, and how they interoperate. It is therefore crucial to evaluate the medium- and long-term benefits in comparison to this initial overhead in order to make a procurement decision.
    
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  Roadmap towards OSS introduction and integration. OSS introduction and migration needs well-defined long-term roadmaps to avoid chaos and ineffective use of resources. Such a roadmap needs to be designed by a group of experts from several public administration agencies, led by MIAP and NAIS. Possible steps towards such a roadmap could be as follows:
  
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    Every agency defines a roadmap to integrate, consolidate OSS solutions into their IT infrastructure. The plan contains the details of how to integrate and/or substitute current software to OSS and how to migrate the data from the former to the latter. The goal will certainly not be to replace existing applications that are built to support the e-government initiatives of the last years. The goal should rather be to define clear guidelines as how the OSS can be used in the future or in areas that do not directly interact with the existing landscape. If the study identifies areas where interaction between OSS and existing proprietary-based software is needed, a clear plan as how to integrate the two in a seamless way is required.
    
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    An expert group selects on behalf of MIAP and/or NAIS a few migration scenarios out of the roadmaps provided by different agencies. In addition, other existing plans, if any, for investments in governmental IT services in the near future can be identified, where OSS could be considered from the very beginning. These scenarios can be used in a first step towards a more large-scale OS migration strategy. The selected migration scenarios will serve as “proofs of concept”, as case studies in the process during which expertise is built and lessons are learned about good practices and pitfalls. These studies can also serve as an initial benchmark to concretely quantify potential benefits of OSS migration. For each selected migration/introduction scenarios, a clear plan of the steps to conduct as well as a clear budget plan need to be carefully developed.
    
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  Open Source Business Eco-System. The existence of a business open-source ecosystem consisting of companies with expertise in the open source market is a prerequisite for a successful open source strategy in Albania. Some small scale pilot projects similar to the LiMux project, but in a much smaller scale, e.g., migrating the workstation environments of a municipality or of a ministry to open source operating systems and applications on top of them can help not only in gaining first hands-on experience with open source software in public administration, but would also be very helpful to start building the afore mentioned business eco-system. On top of that, the government should define a strategy for building a sustainable OSS business ecosystem in Albania, including a plan for improving the education in this respect and for raising the awareness in the society. A functioning OSS business ecosystem could in a long term not only serve the needs of the public sector and of the IT market in Albania, but could also have good chances in the outsourcing business.