Section 3.6. Open Source Skill Building

3.6. Open Source Skill Building

Using technology to solve problems in business is rarely easy. Many traps and obstacles lie waiting. Open source projects are not immune to any of the common failures of requirements gathering, project management, or technical glitches that knock projects off track. IT departments must learn to be on the lookout for such problems and understand how to prevent them.

The point of this chapter was to show that open source is a seductively powerful tool. You can quickly make it do amazing things. This can lead an IT department to rush ahead and take advantage of the power of open source without asking the right questions about how it will be supported.

The most common nightmare is that one person understands open source and creates infrastructure or applications using it that nobody else in the IT department understands. When that person leaves, the department is left with an unmaintainable mess. Of course, the same thing happens with custom code or ancient applications. The remedy is a systematic identification of skills needed to support open source and a program for maintaining them inside a department. Compared to the thrill of getting a new open source project working, this is a relatively mundane activity, but one that is required to avoid a nightmare.

Skill building is a gradual process. Don't expect to get everything right the first time you try anything with open source. Adapting even the most mature open source projects to a normal IT environment will usually involve learning something new or figuring something out. If you hate the thought of this, and you would rather spend time on the phone to a support center than wading through a puzzle of different interlocking open source software programs, open source won't be a fun or profitable experience for you.

From a management point of view, this means that open source has a different problem resolution process than commercial software. Instead of talking on the phone to a technical support person, the next steps for resolving a problem involve running a diagnostic process inside the department. With open source, all the information and access required are available. It is the IT department's job to make sure the skills are available as well.

Open source, like most technology, can be thought of as a puzzle. If the idea of facing that puzzle, conquering it, and getting the reward from using the software is exciting to you, open source will probably be exciting to you as well. This book is in many ways about helping IT departments understand the size of the puzzles they choose to face, the skills and amount of time it will take to solve them, and whether there is much to gain by solving these puzzles in the first place.