Business Decision Criteria

So, you are looking at a new application. Or you have a new business problem to solve. You know you need software, but which way to go – proprietary or Open Source?

What criteria do government technology leaders use to make that decision?

Terry Edwards CIO, Army Material Command isn’t shy about saying cost becomes a key criteria in making a decision.

“A lot of times whether we like it or not, we are burdened by our existing investments,” notes Edwards. These are existing investments that have to do with the existing support structure and the training issues involved. To support a user base, developers have to have expertise and knowledge in a particular area.

“I think that our legacy investments is one reason why Open Source solutions have been at a disadvantage,” says Edwards, “but we are trying to change that.”

Edwards says that when looking at cost, “some of the Army’s legacy investments are costing us a lot to sustain. So now when we look at Open Source solutions we are looking at how we can turn that model and reduce our cost of ownership for the command. So that’s how we look at it.”

Security is obviously a big concern to Edwards. “Sometimes when people think Open Source, they think vulnerabilities. But they don’t look at it and say with Open Source we do have access to all the code and components. We can do a better job in security but that is the perception.”

Navy: Cut & Dried
 

When looking at a new program or application at Navy, CIO Robert Carey says, “the first thing we look at is what are the needs and where are the requirements and does Open Source meet it or not. It’s pretty cut and dried.”

According to Carey, how well the solution fits, the agility and flexibility factors, cost, interoperability and security are drivers. “We do have a very structured way by which we will make a choice on which particular applications and tools get into our systems,” explains Carey.

“That being said, recently we’ve opened the door and allowed the Department to use Open Source as if it’s any other tool,” says Carey. “That’s something that’s been a great benefit to examine OSS as if it was any other tool. That’s new, that’s the thing that has been a great benefit to allow that examination, to allow people to say ‘hey I can use certain things that maybe I didn’t think I could before’ and then ‘what are the ramifications of using open source versus proprietary software?’”

Everyone agrees that the “net generation” that is coming down the pike are the future of government. “These young kids coming out of high school or coming out of college are very familiar with these tools, very familiar with Mozilla, Firefox, these kinds of things,” says Carey. “That’s their expectation as they come to work. OSS is one of the major players in the new internet, the Web 2.0, the Web 3.0.  How do we take advantage of that and that’s a factor that we are now coming to grips with and that’s a good thing.”

The Mission Is Paramount

GSA CIO Casey Coleman agrees with Carey and Edwards that using Open Source is not a technology decision, it really is about what are the mission requirements, what is the program requirement;  what solution, be it open source or packaged commercial software, fits those requirements and meets that need.

“It’s important to level the playing field to make sure that Open Source gets a seat at the table in terms of the evaluation list because the Open Source community doesn’t have the footprint, doesn’t have the voice of advocacy to the same degree as the packaged software vendors,” says Coleman.

“So it’s important to not overlook that element and make sure that you’ve done a thorough evaluation. I think it also calls upon the government to have a little bit more of a technically sophisticated dedicated government core team to be able to do that work and take the initiative to examine open source. So I think that that’s a good thing.” ###

The Future Is Now

When it comes to the future of Open Source solutions, the panel is unanimous in its opinion that Open Source will grow and become more integrated into and become mainstream applications.

Terry Edwards, CIO, Army Material Command    

I look at a couple of things. One is creating the environment, the support structure that will enable us to introduce capability rapidly to meet the changing demands of our customer base because they are varied.

I think if we do that then great things will happen. I think open source is one of those building blocks that we could use to really level the playing field and enable our community.

The second piece is one of those challenges that we as CIOs have in our business is we have to constantly look at cost of ownership. Reducing that cost of ownership to our community.

And then lastly as we focus on service delivery, what are the tools and capabilities that we need to build and constantly build to meet us providing that capability to the end users reliably. So I think for us is if we set that structure in place, then I think the environment will change.

Robert Carey, CIO, Navy

We think Open Source is going to continue to grow at the Navy and primarily because the model, Open Source development doesn’t tolerate or encourage code stagnation.

You have to stay with the program, you have to continue to evolve in order to get better. We see that as a mechanism to deliver solution speed to the war fighter, if you will. So I don’t have nine months to develop a solution when the tactics in the battle field are changing every 30 days. So this becomes one of those agile tools in the tool box that lets me get something in the hands of the user fast.

Andrew Gordon, Unisys

I think about it in terms of adoption priorities over the next five years. As the Open Source model matures in federal, then more conservative users are going to be attracted and as more conservative adopters consider more Open Source solutions, then the priorities shift.

The priorities shift from around agility and independence and they are going to shift to cost and risk mitigation. And I am seeing some of that now. Really to appeal to these new adopters the communities are really going to have to focus their sharpness on maturity, governance, code pedigree as well as IP risk management.

And lastly they are going to really need to get third party software vendors such as SAP to support them. Having large software companies support them like my SQL being embedded in SAP for instance is an important threshold for the open source communities to cross. So really as those communities become more mature and robust in their offerings they will be able to expand their base to become part of federal mission critical applications over the coming years.

Paul Smith, Red Hat

So the paradigm is definitely changing and if we go back 5 years and  I’ve got a son who is a freshman in college and I sent him an email the other day and he didn’t respond to me and I finally got in touch with him and he said “Dad, I don’t read email. Email is the new snail mail.”

 So if you are going to be talking to these kids today, you are text messaging, you are Instant Messaging or I’m poking him on Face Book. So what that means is that you have to adapt to an environment that’s going to be looking at mobile computing and devices and so forth.

Appliances in general. And Linux is just very well situated for that type of environment where you can go from the mobile device to the desk top to the data center all within one contiguous type of operating system and environment. And if you look at some studies, IEC shows a huge growth in open source throughout the federal government in particular, right now about 12 to 13% of all enterprise servers are running Linux of some variety and within the next three to four years IDC says it will grow to almost as much as 20%.

We think that by 2015 there’s probably going to be two choices out there Linux and some other variety because the economics just will not support a complex environment where data center directors have to support so many different environments.

Casey Coleman, CIO, GSA

“You are just going to see an acceleration of this paradigm shift to web 2.0. A world of open standards based solutions and interoperable web services. The rapid assembly of new capabilities, we are not going to be coding things from scratch any more, we are going to be assembling from our toolbox, from our set of web services, new capabilities and end users are going to have more control over their work space through collaboration and instant messaging and unified messaging and it’s going to put a lot more power in the hands of the end users. And open source is a foundational piece of that.  ###

“There are two principal business drivers leading to Open Source use during contract delivery,” notes Unisys’ Andrew Gordon, “and that’s really a low barrier to entry and reduced time to deployment.”

But despite these two great reasons, there are constraints, difficulties and issues that need to be overcome challenges to use open source in the federal government.

“I don’t think it’s a technological issue,” says GSA CIO Casey Coleman. “You didn’t hear a single word today about any concerns of the technical soundness of OSS. So it is a people issue, a process issue, a cultural issue.”

Coleman says that while the traditional procurement process doesn’t really favor or support open source solutions, “it takes an extra effort to make sure that that is included as part of your process.”

Coleman thinks some are daunted by the licensing because there’s a variety of different types of Open Source licensing and “it takes a little bit of effort to understand the different flavors and understand how to comply with the different licensing. It’s not a major point but a minor point, but also there’s really not a certification process to give that seal of approval to various open source solutions. But there is a strong and growing professional support community to support these open source solutions professionally.”

Navy CIO Robert Carey agrees that culture is the culprit.

“It’s generally never about the technology in our world,” says Carey. “The complexity of intellectual property rights about what happens to the code, where does it go if we embed it in something called the national security system. What happens? Just that very question is a challenge for us because of culture and the way we’ve treated things that’s not to say that OSS doesn’t work for us.”

Carey went on to explain. “The other thing is that just defining, which we did in the memo in June, defining OSS as COTS cleared up a misperception that OSS was something else. So we are trying to open doors and again open up the lid of the tool box and show that there are 150,000 tools out there that can be used and the question is be mindful as you use them, because we have to understand what we buy, and what we embed, and where it goes, so that we can actually continue to conduct mission with it and continue to modify the code as we see fit.”

Army’s Terry Edwards sees other challenges.

“In the mid 90s I used to be the integrator of Army Battle Command. In those days most of our systems were Unix based type systems,” says Edwards. “But what came about from that whole experience was the perception that it was harder. Only engineers could do this stuff and it was not user friendly. And as a result a migration, a movement to the commercial systems started coming about.”

“Well today we are heavily vested in those commercial proprietary solutions but also what we are seeing is those proprietary solutions are not scaling to meet our needs. They are not as robust as we would like it to be, we don’t have the flexibility to change what needs to get changed.”

“So what I think the challenge is for us is to put back that support structure and integrate this Open Source capability,” adds Edwards. “And once we see capability that has been totally packaged from the user interface to the infrastructure piece, then people are going to, our customer base is going to come back. They are not going to perceive it as being harder to do.”

“I think that our focus as leaders is to re-establish that support structure and to start introducing capability into our architecture and demonstrate the goodness of open source capability and what it will do for our environment.” ###