ICT Intent

“Yeah, we use a lot of open source stuff, I quite like the philosophy,” said the network manager of a college I have recently worked in. She then listed the individual pieces of software that keep the systems running, the e-mail routing and the web content hosted. Her manager (on the SMT) naturally had no idea what was being deployed and didn’t much care as long as it worked.

And here lay the problem. The network manager and a couple of skilled technicians were doing a sterling job keeping the system afloat. Probing deeper revealed that the decision to use so much open source software was down to underinvestment in ICT and not its quality or fitness for purpose. In an institution where the purse holders had not engaged in ICT, the technical team had compensated for the lack of cash by using free software and a lot of their own time in learning how to configure it. The true costs of maintaining and developing the ICT infrastructure remained hidden from managers and further risks introduced for future strategic decisions.

I am a big fan of open source software and use it daily on my own desktop and servers. I have seen it used effectively in many schools and colleges.

When senior leaders do not have a sound vision for ICT and where there has been prior underinvestment it is easy to see people chose to go open source:

• You do not have to repeatedly ask for money from someone who may be unsympathetic or unconvinced.
• There may be a community on the net that gives you a sense of belonging.
• You get to choose areas in which you can develop your own skills and knowledge.
• You get to a sense of personal pride from problem solving in a situation where you can cast yourself as the hero.

However, from an organisational perspective this can exacerbate some risks:

• The total cost of ownership remains unclear for senior managers and can become even more complex to calculate.
• Knowledge of how the system works can be held by one person and therefore dependent on their health, disposition and reliability.
• Senior managers may later take a strategic decision without knowledge of the system and its capabilities and costs. I have seen this cause a real and expensive organisational crisis many times.

Of course none of those risks are intrinsic to open source software; they arise from a lack of overall vision, poor strategic planning for ICT, and a lack of managerial and financial investment.

I think you need to be good to use open source software well in schools and colleges. Good in the sense that you need to know what you want to achieve from your ICT infrastructure, the impact you want it to have on improving outcomes, and have the confidence to invest fully in ICT. You also need to have good technical staff and a healthy, open relationship between senior managers and technicians.

Then the choice to deploy open source can then be made on the basis of its quality, suitability and support, just as would any other approach be it proprietary or managed services.