Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

03

DEC

When to adopt Open Source

03 DEC 2010 | Posted in business value, CMS, CRM, open source, strategic IT | Author Alex McLachlan | 4 Comments

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When is Open Source business ready? People are naturally cautious about adopting open source software.

Open source can raise images long straggly beards and sandals and of the potential difficulties of poor quality software and an uncertain future.

However, there are a number of very good quality open source systems - look at Linux for example - and they can offer very good value for money. There are also a large number of open source software applications including:

• Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress and Umbraco - website Content Management Systems (we use Drupal for our website)
• Moodle - Learning Management System (used by the Open University for example)
• CiviCRM - Customer Relationship Management (mainly used for donor-based charities)

So how to decide, particularly for SMEs and NFP organisations who don't normally have large IT departments?

The factors you should take into account are:

• Maturity - is the system mature? Has it been through a number of releases? Is the software stable? Do releases go through good QA and testing processes?
• Functionality -  does the system have the functionality you need? It is of no benefit to select "free" software, only to have to spend significant sums implementing features you need.
• Commercial support - for implementing the sytem for you. For most NFP organisations and SMEs, this means having a choice of moderate sized companies who have a track record of implementations (individual contractors are not ideal for most SMEs, at least initially).

The decisions are likely to vary because it does depend on the detail of what you need it to do. Drupal, Moodle and Joomla are likely to be suitable for most organisations, but CiviCRM is likely to be suitable only for organisations that can use it "out of the box".