The Introduction of OpenOffice.org in the Brussels Public Administration

Abstract

Abstract. Open source software is increasingly used by public administrations as an alternative to commercial software. In this paper we present a case study of the transition of the ministerial cabinets of the Brussels-Capital Region towards OpenOfRce.org. In this case, the decision to use open source software was taken by the Government of the Brussels-Capital Region. The goal of the paper is to outline the implementation trajectory followed and to compare our findings to previous studies in this field as well as other Information Systems literature. Additionally, we discuss how OpenOfl^ce.org was received by end users as well as the IT department that was responsible for the migration. Our findings indicate that although a migration towards OpenOfiice.org is feasible, a number of difficulties still remain. For example, end user perceptions of OpenOffice.org are not always favorable and migration costs (document conversion and training) can be significant.

Adoption of open source software in software-intensive organizations – A systematic literature review

“…Each organization should therefore evaluate the implications of approaching OSS in their own context [189]. This is increasingly important when we see that many organizations adopt OSS without knowing concretely if or how they will benefit from it and without having a clear strategy behind this adoption [91,187,188,190].…”

“…Most of these papers illustrate successful use of one or more OSS products (see Table 8 for an overview of the research papers). While the deployment of OSS can give cost savings, migrating from one technological platform to another is hard work which often includes customization, adaptation, integration, and testing [62,187].…”

“…The general costs related to such a migration are unclear [62,187], and there are very few studies showing complete calculations of the true costs and savings of (1) introducing OSS products into organizations, and (2) keeping the OSS products operational over a longer period of time. One paper reports cost savings from an OSS migration project at Beaumont Hospital [81], but it is published just after the initial stage of the project is finished.…”

“…Despite this unclarity, many organizations seem to be blinded by the perceived advantages of OSS and have therefore adopted it without performing any cost-benefit evaluations in their own context [91,187,190]. The adoption of OSS is furthermore frequently bottom-up, in the sense that it is introduced by engineers rather than strategic top-level decisions [188].…”

“…Next, it is claimed that the existence of freely available software allows faster adoption of technology, increased innovation, and reduced costs and time-to-market [33,139]. These potential advantages have influenced how organizations acquire software, and have led to a significant adoption of OSS products in several domains [89,98,140,187]. Finally, OSS and its general lack of license fees contribute to shifting the software industry's traditional licensebased business models towards service-based models [79].…”