[vox-outreach] Speaker possibility as GTC

[Michael Wenk]

On Monday 26 April 2004 06:00 pm, Bill Kendrick wrote:
>
> Yeaaah...  there's always a reason to not go with OSS.  But really, in the
> end, it's usually hard to swallow.  But, in cases like Gov't Tech
> (vs. Joe Desktop User), it probably happens often.

Actually, I'm gonna throw my .02 cents in here. 

If an office switches from MS, the first thing they lose is the training and 
momentum their personell already have in the systems they are running.  
Providing you can get them to migrate the first thing they'll need to do is 
retrain their people on the new system and apps.  While a tech person may be 
able to easily make this jump, support people such as AAs and other clerks 
that usually are the backbone of these operations, they won't as easily make 
the jump.  So you'll need to show that first it is not as steep a learning 
curve as they think it is, and second that if their personnell need training 
its available and costs are reasonable(Are they?)  You also need to show that 
any training costs and dev costs(the apps they're running are not likely to 
run as written now when switched) are offset by the savings in license costs, 
and with increased productivity.  If you do that, then by and large most of 
those guys will listen, especially now days.  My experience has selling to 
government showing hard numbers in terms of cost savings.  

One way to go about this would be to research the prototypical office in 
government, and do an on paper migration, take the costs of that and contrast 
it with costs of ongoing license fees for apps, and(to cheat slightly on one 
hand and be fair on the other) one upgrade cycle.  

That's probably how I would do such a thing...   

-- 
wenk@praxis.homedns.org
Mike Wenk