IT executives from a dozen states will meet in Oregon this week to take a close look at open source software and how a collaborative approach to application development could help them cut costs and speed software development.
Collaboration is becoming increasingly important as government organizations now comfortable with Linux consider relying on open source for business applications. The issue will be among several areas covered during the first Government Open Source Conference in Portland this week.
The event, sponsored by Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab , also will include discussion about the benefits and challenges of migrating from legacy applications to open source. In addition, attendees will hear firsthand from government officials already bringing in open source.
“Most of these agencies are already using Linux . Now they’re trying to figure out, ‘OK, we’ve got the low-hanging fruit. What about the stuff we’re spending a lot of money on: custom solutions?’,” says Scott Kveton, associate director of the Oregon State University Open Source Lab.
That’s where an open source-based collaboration approach can help, analysts say.
“Particularly in state and local governments, you have a situation where there are a lot of things that they do that are very similar state to state,” says Michael Goulde, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. “There are all sorts of things that require software, and rather than purchasing individual packages or developing individual applications it just makes a whole lot of sense for governmental entities to collaborate, to create communities, and jointly develop and share software.”
Universities and colleges have been collaborating on software development within organizations, such as the Sakai Project, launched by the University of Michigan and Indiana University in January 2004 to develop open source collaboration and education-focused software.
“The idea is that they can build applications and defray the cost and risk across several different organizations,” Kveton says. “State government saw this and said, ‘Jeez, we could do the same thing but with state, local and federal government.'”
Voting for Linux Like corporate buyers, government agencies are looking at Linux and open source applications to cut costs and are helping to drive the fast-growing market: | ||||||
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The hope is that the Government Open Source Conference will spur cooperation between government IT executives, Kveton says. “We’ll be breaking out into agency groups and hopefully will define some projects,” he adds.
About 115 IT managers from 12 states, including California, Idaho, Montana, South Carolina and Virginia are expected to attend.
The conference was initiated in May as a way to bring together government leaders in Oregon, but it quickly expanded, Kveton says. Across the country, government agencies are beginning to look at ways they can work together to develop open source applications.
Andy Stein, director of IT in the city of Newport News, Va., for example, turned to open source and collaboration last year as a way to cut costs when faced with the task of replacing more than 150 legacy applications running on a mainframe. While Stein couldn’t estimate how much the city will save by collaborating with states such as Massachusetts and Rhode Island, he estimates the costs without collaboration would be about $30 million.
“I’m trying to develop a collaborative development process between peer governments,” says Stein, who will participate in the CIO Perspectives Panel at the conference. “We in government have similar needs so why couldn’t we develop software collaboratively?”
Peter Quinn, CIO for the commonwealth of Massachusetts, has put the spotlight on open source by pushing for open standards. The state recently finalized a plan to scrap Microsoft’s Office software in order to standardize on the Open Document Format for Office Applications.
“Having open document formats and leveraging open standards is absolutely critical to what we’re doing,” Kveton says.
Stein agrees. “For government, collaboration is where the real value [of open source] is,” he says. “The product piece is important . . . but by far the value to me is in embracing the parts of the collaborative development methodology that made open source so successful.”
