10.1 Not it, not business processes, but organizational culture  (Page 4/13)

Probably for all HEIs, but especially for those with tightly constrained budgets, it is critical to find existing open-source applications to build on to get the maximum impact from in-house developers’ time and energy. In the long term then, acceptance of FLOSS in the Academy is essential to support innovation in teaching and learning. Below, I will go into the reasons it is necessary to adopt FLOSS now rather than later.

Organizational culture

Open source software is not incidental to my unit’s business model; for very deliberate reasons it is at the very heart of the way we do business.

As professionals we are defined by others by the services we provide them and our relationships with them. Our tools are key to enabling us to provide those services and affect the quality of the services we can provide. It is important therefore to choose tools that empower us as IT professionals, and allow us to serve our clients well and empower them. In designing Instruction Support Systems in 2003, it was my goal to design a unit that would function as a trusted advisor and strategic partner to the UWI teaching and learning community. I believe/d FLOSS was essential to realizing that vision.

In contrast, in quite a number of IT departments in our Caribbean organizations, including our HEIs, IT staff simply install proprietary software and provide Help Desk type support to their clients. This is especially the case for smaller and younger organizations. For most small organizations, because proprietary closed-source software closes off the very possibility in many cases for changing software to meet particular organizational needs, clients learn not to ask for modifications and IT staff learn not to encourage clients to think too much about their particular needs, needs which would be expensive to meet with such license regimes. (In fact one of my Deans still occasionally reminds me I tried to get him to use WebCT.) In some ways then, proprietary closed-source software is fundamentally disempowering. Of course this is not the case for software that meets or exceeds your needs. Also, it is not only license regimes that disempower IT staff and the entire organization; poorly documented or architected software, regardless of license also has a disempowering effect, as does lack of appropriate IT skills for both end users and IT staff.

However, what I am interested in getting at is the significant empowering effects of FLOSS in the enterprise and the enormous positive impacts on organizational culture.

FLOSS gives us the power to say to faculty members and other clients, “imagine what you want, think it through and tell me on Monday morning.” On Monday, we can sit with them in their office, discuss their requirements, and maybe even show them a demo application hosted on a virtual machine somewhere in the data centre. We can continue to refine requirements, timeliness and required resources, and if need be, discuss honestly why it is not feasible to do it until next year or the year after or the next decade.