The CIO of the city of Helsinki wants to make more data publicly available, saying this trumps battling IT vendor lock-in. "Instead of changing the office product, we focus on developing the ICT ecosystem by opening up more and more public datasets and engage our external ecosystem to create value to the community. For us, it will pay off more."
With this proposal, Helsinki's CIO, Markku Raitio, responds to questions regarding last year's tests to use an alternative office suite. "There is no rationale to replace the proprietary office suite by another product."
Raitio says there are several reasons to remain locked-in. "The details are difficult to communicate and understand, and they are only valid for Helsinki."
The city's IT department was criticised yesterday in a report published by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). The advocacy organisation alleges that the IT department and its IT service provider bungled a ten-month trial with OpenOffice, an open source suite of office tools, by using a crippled version and by not providing any assistance to the users - the city council members.
The FSFE also calls into doubt the IT department's cost calculations. "(They) concluded that switching to OpenOffice would cost 74 per cent more than continuing to use current proprietary office suite. (...) The part of the report presenting the calculation is only three pages, and it lacks any actual calculations."
Raitio declined to clarify the numbers.
The IT department made its report on the OpenOffice pilot available to the city council on 28 December 2011. The report concludes that an alternative office suite is not viable because the city's IT system is built to take advantage of the proprietary office suite. Changing the office suite would ripple through the entire IT system. This "major modification (...) would take a lot of time and a lot of money, draining the resources for other IT projects." It adds that similar office projects have taken a long time and that objectives have not always been met.
The result is no surprise to Martti Karjalainen, the recently retired CIO at Finlands' Ministry of Justice. Karjalainen managed the switch to OpenOffice between 2007 and 2010, involving 12,000 PCs in the ministry, the state legal aid offices, the court houses, the probation services and prisons.
"The project did not arrange any training at all. Without training, there is a big chance that results will not be good. The OpenOffice test was ordered by the city council, so the IT staff was perhaps not very motivated in the project. The report shows that the city is very tightly locked-in to their office suite. So it was not a surprise that the costs are not favourable for the open source alternative."
More information:
Report by the Helsinki's IT department(In Finnish, pdf)
FSFE statement
FSFE analysis
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