Organizational Culture

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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.

    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.

Table

    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 will whenever in IT they choose to work.

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