10.1 Not it, not business processes, but organizational culture  (Page 5/13)

Clients may be disappointed, but they feel empowered because they know the default response to their requests is “let’s talk about it.” And we can afford that response not because we have an army of developers to throw at any problem, but because the riches of the open source community is now a University resource. (However, I do not mean to suggest that the majority of University staff are already so empowered that the rate of requests is at the desired level. We need to do more marketing and capacity building.) I am very happy that I do not have to worry about my clients rejecting an open-source application because of a stigma attached. Except for the more tech-savvy clients who want to know that the applications they are using are open-source, few clients raise the issue of the license type.

It is relatively straight-forward too to see how involvement in the FLOSS community allows me to rapidly align or re-align the IT unit with the organization’s strategic goals. Not having to worry about adding to the significant software license burden (which are called mandatory costs here at UWI), long procurement periods, context-free vendor presentations, political jockeying with other units for scarce resources, means I can get the software installed with at least three times the efficiency and even greater responsiveness to changes in organizational priorities, than if I were trying to use equivalent proprietary software in most instances. This has allowed us to focus some of that saved attention on implementing proper control and service management frameworks using the Control Objectives for IT (COBIT) and the ITIL Service Management framework.

What really excites me too is that using open-source software allows me to co-imagine and implement an academic IT architecture that we could never afford to implement using proprietary equivalents. Here is a list of some of the server applications we have been working with since August 2006 and expect to work on for another two years. I look forward to discussing other possible choices with you.

Finally, and probably best of all, FLOSS allows me to give my staff interesting work to do and allows them to be creative in developing both deep technical skills and client relationship skills that will serve them well wherever in IT they choose to work.

I look forward to discussing some of these issues with you.

Responses

11 Responses to “Not IT, not Business Processes, but Organizational Culture”

1. ken udas – “not it, not business processes, but organizational culture”

Craig, Hello. Thank you for this interesting and thoughtful posting.

To kick things off I would like to gather your thoughts on the notion of “Open Source Teaching” that was introduced in James Dalziel’s posting Learning Design and Open Source Teaching, which marries OSS in terms of the “learning code” that underlies learning design and OER in terms on the content that is part of the learning design.