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The thing people in technology forget is that the most expensive resource in government is the people who work there. Every person in my IT department is top of

The thing people in technology forget is that the most expensive resource in government is the people who work there. Every person in my IT department is top of their game, everyone of them has been continually honing their skill sets and are following their interests. This has put us a head of a lot of other municipalities and a lot of private companies. We've had to send ADFS and Azure consultants back because our crew was better, as an example. Those people live and breathe Microsoft. Those people are the reason we didn't have to renew our server room, when we decided to go own-cloud in a major hosting center instead, and they are they reason we'll soon be able to move our cloud from rental to Azure. Sure we could have used other technologies for it, but it would cost an unimaginable amount of money to replace the entire IT-workforce. I'm certain we could retrain our current staff, but a lot of them wouldn't want to, because the truth is, if they wanted to be working with non-Microsoft technologies then they would have been snatched up by our "competition" already. I think open source should play an important role in government, and I think that role should increase steadily going forward, but I also think people and reason should come before an ideology. With 370 different IT-systems of various magnitude we already have some that run on Linux. JBOSS and Wildfly are big in government, but out of our entire system portfolio only a fraction of the systems even have non-Microsoft alternatives. Other systems are on 8 year contracts, making it impossible to swap them out overnight even if we wanted to. Which we don't because we would need to replace every system, and get every employee on board with open source alternatives in order to save the insignificant Microsoft licensing fees which make up less than 1% of our IT budget. Sure, Europe is bound to Microsoft and that can be problematic. What if Trump truly goes apeshit for instance? Then we would be royally fucked. The truth is that there is no viable alternative that won't be ridiculously exoensive and take up to 50 years to fully implement. With everything heading for the cloud it might not even make sense. The only cloud options for a huge part of the European public sector are labeled with Google, Amazaon or Azure - and none of them would make the legislative challenges or licenses any less of an issue. At least with Microsoft, we have a company who has been really open to quickly and efficiently meeting European demands.

shmerl 9y ago
> Sure we could have used other technologies for it, but it would cost an unimaginable amount of money to replace the entire IT-workforce. It's worth doing it, to get rid of the sick MS lock-in. Breaking the catch 22 needs to start from somewhere.
- eksemplar 9y ago
  Our tech guys are absolute wizards, most with a fair business understanding. Replacing just one of them is around $500000 with no guarantees that we could find someone suitable. We're a medium sized municipality in Scandinavia sitting next to the largest one in the country, meaning that getting good tech staff is already extremely hard with the popular technologies. The staff who work here now do so because of benefits or ideals, not the pay, where we will never be able to compete. On top of that it's taken more than 25 years and five different middle managers to build the right kind of culture. I'm sorry, but why would we ever want break that? And why on earth would we do it to possible break free from the Microsoft lock-in 25 years from now, when Microsoft licenses are less than 1% of our IT spending? And that's just the tech perspective. We'd also have to reschool 7000 employees on everyday software considering how integrated the office365 platform is here. And where is the open source alternative to 365? (I'm sorry for the wall of text if you were being sarcastic)
  - shmerl 9y ago
    I thought there are actually quite a lot of Linux developers in Scandinavia, though I have no idea about sysamdins. I agree that finding good specialists is always hard. I'm not sarcastic. For the government organization, it can be just a matter of principle.
    - eksemplar 9y ago
      All the development we do ourselves is on .Net core, Java or Python so as far as development goes we're pretty much all open source. We even share a few systems with other municipalities through our official github. When we buy systems open source isn't as important to us as ownership, but it's still relatively important. Operations is a different story though. As mentioned we use Jboss, and we run it on CentOS. We tried hiring a sysadmin to run our Linux farm, but we've yet to find someone qualified. So all our Linux servers are supported remotely by a consultant company. You're correct of course. If the political will is there we could change it. It would be a nearly impossible task, requiring us to rebuild our entire infrastructure from scratch, retraining or replacing 50 staff members and rescooling 7000 as well as rebuilding around 200 systems, of which 50 are major and would have a replacement cost exceeding our entire yearly budget each. If the government decided to take the country down that road, it would be a different and much more manageable story, and they kind of have. Open source is a priority in the official strategy of digitization, at least in Denmark. But it'll take a looong time to implement, and we won't be starting with Microsoft because no one really wants to replace Microsoft with uncertainty.
sqeaky 9y ago
> take up to 50 years to fully implemen It didn't take you 50 years to get here, why would it take 50 years to to get somewhere. You also have the benefit of knowing what a successful system looks like, so you can avoid many pitfalls from the first attempt.
- eksemplar 9y ago
  We buy systems we have no clue how work. Like the system we use for telemedicine, or the system we use for electronic locks in elderly care. It's not that we don't want to know how they work. The political administration has simply decided upon a decentralized strategy in which any one can buy anything because there is a belief and trust in localized knowledge. As a central unit we don't support android because it's impossible to keep safe enough to meet EU law. This, however, doesn't mean that the system to handle electronic locks we bought last year doesn't run on android. It also doesn't integrate with our data warehouse, meaning that 800 user profiles has to be maintained manually but hey. I have 250 examples like that, but the point is that it's complicated and that there are no easy black and white solutions. Maybe it hadn't taken exactly 50 years to get where we are now, but it's certainly taken 25. We couldn't just unravel it over night, even if we wanted to.
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    > We buy systems we have no clue how work. Well that doesn't seem like a good starting for any but the smallest ventures. National governments have a special interest in safety and security. Fixing this, even in a piecemeal way is surely a step in the right direction. The attitude of the your post and the higher GP post sound more like people lamenting something some natural disaster that can never change. Instead you could be looking at a system built by people and maintained by people and on some level understood by people and choose to make it better.
    - eksemplar 9y ago
      I'm pragmatic. We've been actively trying to change things for the past many years. Thanks to new EU security directive we're getting there. Progress is slow though, and it's not like we couldn't do better if the politicians wanted it. That's the thing about public administration though, citizens genuinely don't care about IT, and bottom up management simply doesn't produce fast changes in organizational culture.
Kaligule 9y ago
I don't think people come always before ideology. Imagine a medival king saying "But we have all these great torturers, we havily invested into them, they are the best of their kind and they bring great results. We can't stop torture now."

shmerl 9y ago

> Sure we could have used other technologies for it, but it would cost an unimaginable amount of money to replace the entire IT-workforce. It's worth doing it, to get rid of the sick MS lock-in. Breaking the catch 22 needs to start from somewhere.

eksemplar 9y ago
Our tech guys are absolute wizards, most with a fair business understanding. Replacing just one of them is around $500000 with no guarantees that we could find someone suitable. We're a medium sized municipality in Scandinavia sitting next to the largest one in the country, meaning that getting good tech staff is already extremely hard with the popular technologies. The staff who work here now do so because of benefits or ideals, not the pay, where we will never be able to compete. On top of that it's taken more than 25 years and five different middle managers to build the right kind of culture. I'm sorry, but why would we ever want break that? And why on earth would we do it to possible break free from the Microsoft lock-in 25 years from now, when Microsoft licenses are less than 1% of our IT spending? And that's just the tech perspective. We'd also have to reschool 7000 employees on everyday software considering how integrated the office365 platform is here. And where is the open source alternative to 365? (I'm sorry for the wall of text if you were being sarcastic)
- shmerl 9y ago
  I thought there are actually quite a lot of Linux developers in Scandinavia, though I have no idea about sysamdins. I agree that finding good specialists is always hard. I'm not sarcastic. For the government organization, it can be just a matter of principle.
  - eksemplar 9y ago
    All the development we do ourselves is on .Net core, Java or Python so as far as development goes we're pretty much all open source. We even share a few systems with other municipalities through our official github. When we buy systems open source isn't as important to us as ownership, but it's still relatively important. Operations is a different story though. As mentioned we use Jboss, and we run it on CentOS. We tried hiring a sysadmin to run our Linux farm, but we've yet to find someone qualified. So all our Linux servers are supported remotely by a consultant company. You're correct of course. If the political will is there we could change it. It would be a nearly impossible task, requiring us to rebuild our entire infrastructure from scratch, retraining or replacing 50 staff members and rescooling 7000 as well as rebuilding around 200 systems, of which 50 are major and would have a replacement cost exceeding our entire yearly budget each. If the government decided to take the country down that road, it would be a different and much more manageable story, and they kind of have. Open source is a priority in the official strategy of digitization, at least in Denmark. But it'll take a looong time to implement, and we won't be starting with Microsoft because no one really wants to replace Microsoft with uncertainty.

sqeaky 9y ago

> take up to 50 years to fully implemen It didn't take you 50 years to get here, why would it take 50 years to to get somewhere. You also have the benefit of knowing what a successful system looks like, so you can avoid many pitfalls from the first attempt.

eksemplar 9y ago
We buy systems we have no clue how work. Like the system we use for telemedicine, or the system we use for electronic locks in elderly care. It's not that we don't want to know how they work. The political administration has simply decided upon a decentralized strategy in which any one can buy anything because there is a belief and trust in localized knowledge. As a central unit we don't support android because it's impossible to keep safe enough to meet EU law. This, however, doesn't mean that the system to handle electronic locks we bought last year doesn't run on android. It also doesn't integrate with our data warehouse, meaning that 800 user profiles has to be maintained manually but hey. I have 250 examples like that, but the point is that it's complicated and that there are no easy black and white solutions. Maybe it hadn't taken exactly 50 years to get where we are now, but it's certainly taken 25. We couldn't just unravel it over night, even if we wanted to.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  > We buy systems we have no clue how work. Well that doesn't seem like a good starting for any but the smallest ventures. National governments have a special interest in safety and security. Fixing this, even in a piecemeal way is surely a step in the right direction. The attitude of the your post and the higher GP post sound more like people lamenting something some natural disaster that can never change. Instead you could be looking at a system built by people and maintained by people and on some level understood by people and choose to make it better.
  - eksemplar 9y ago
    I'm pragmatic. We've been actively trying to change things for the past many years. Thanks to new EU security directive we're getting there. Progress is slow though, and it's not like we couldn't do better if the politicians wanted it. That's the thing about public administration though, citizens genuinely don't care about IT, and bottom up management simply doesn't produce fast changes in organizational culture.

Kaligule 9y ago

I don't think people come always before ideology. Imagine a medival king saying "But we have all these great torturers, we havily invested into them, they are the best of their kind and they bring great results. We can't stop torture now."