Doubtlessly, this successful migration to desktop Linux must have been very difficult, costly, and disruptive. The upfront costs of migration surely exceed what it would have cost the city to stay on Windows for one or two more waves of upgrades. The important question is: were these upfront costs & multi-year effort worth it?
The data presented in the article provides compelling evidence that the answer is yes -- i.e., the migration's recurring savings exceed its upfront costs:
* The city no longer has to pay for license upgrades, thereby eliminating a major recurring cost forever -- savings of nearly 3 million pounds every three to four years, according to the article. That's huge.
* The city no longer has to upgrade desktop software or hardware as frequently, reducing another recurring cost forever -- also huge.
* Most surprisingly, the city claims its IT department is fielding considerably fewer user complaints with Linux than with Windows, reducing another major cost forever. Labor-intensive IT support is always the costliest component of operating a corporate desktop, so that's also huge.
If the recurring cost savings claimed by the city of Munich are accurate, every budget-strapped city in the planet should be seriously considering this kind of migration to desktop Linux. It makes a lot of sense purely from a financial standpoint.
[UPDATE: I toned down the language and corrected key figures, which were off by an order of magnitude due to an incorrect reading of the article. I also materially changed the bullet point regarding support costs, as the article itself was slightly misleading on the matter. THANK YOU Xylakant and luser001 for pointing out my errors!]
When I hear that metric I think of a homegrown app that was supposed to upload files from PeeCees to the company's mainframe. At the annual IT meeting ...
"And since implementing change foo and bar in the system user complaints to the special helpdesk have declined 90% .."
My boss stood up [1] "That's because the users got tired of calling and not having anything fixed. It's still broken."
The manager/presenter shot daggers at Eric [1]. Cross-hall verbal sniping started. Entertaining.
I had some colleagues use the alpha of a new shiny thing the company was building. But none of them ever reported bugs to the bug tracker, because it was "too complicated and nothing ever happened". So the company had someone flying down to our offices and do a presentation on how the (homegrown) bug tracker works. It was a simple, 18-step process just to file a bug... turned out, it was even worse for developers handling those bugs. Yet, people pointing that out where looked at like the were from mars :/.
Your boss had a good point. At some point, users become savvy to the whole thing and stop complaining and start trying to fix it on their own.
It starts with 'Bobby in accounting told me to X when Y happens' and snowballs from there.
It's horrible on productivity and when IT finally does try to fix it, it's often much, much worse. (Though, when the user gets it right, IT doesn't have to fix it after all.)
There is a correlated phenomenon that might be at work: many help desk calls are a result of what happens after a user tries to "fix it" themselves. Users may be sufficiently ignorant under Linux that they've reduced the number of steps they take "outside the box".
With these kinds of `hooray linux´ articles, I always wonder whether they included the cost of reduced productivity they included when moving everybody from MS Office to LibreOffice and stuff like that. The difference in quality, stability and features is pretty big. I've worked with LibreOffice only for about 8 months, and I can tell you, it's not just a matter of "getting used to". There's simply a whole bunch of bugs (layout screwing up in Writer, Ctrl+Z not perfectly going back to the previous state, etc) and limitations. The time wasted fighting these tools costs a lot as well.
Take 12000 civil servants losing one hour a week on fighting the tools, and you get to 11.7 million pretty fast.
You seem to neglect the fact Office users routinely experience problems with their own documents and programs. Who never had a Word document that, after some heavy editing, refused to load? I have, many times, since the first version of Word for Windows. I've abandoned Office between 2002 and 2008 and, to my surprise, I still had those problems with Word, Project and Outlook (when I had to clean PST files more than once).
At least with Outlook I solved the problem backing up via IMAP to my own server, who kept the mailbox in a very easy to manage maildir folder. The usual Office workaround - opening with OpenOffice and saving back to Office format - never worked for me after 2008 and backups had to be used.
I agree. The FOSS office tools are simply not in the same class as Microsoft Office. Anyone who has worked extensively with Excel will acknowledge there really is no true competitor out there.
Frankly, I would go so far as to say that a Linux desktop OS is really only appropriate for enthusiasts or those with minimal needs (e.g. email). For just about anyone else, there is simply too much potential hassle involved in getting the basics to work (external displays, anyone?).
Personally I find that techies are the hardest to rip away from Office, as they can see all the little bugs, etc. Non-technical people seem to - somehow - overlook these.
I've introduced a number of people now to OpenOffice and they've much preferred it as it has given them back a somewhat familiar interface, after the widely-despised change to ribbon (a UI I actually prefer but it was a shock to many).
I agree that LibreOffice is not an equal to MS Office, but I wonder how many civil servants are doing a lot of original work in an office suite. Seems to me that most of what they would be doing is filling out forms and using other standard templates. Given a suite of working, debugged templates (which seems to be what the "WollMux" extension supplies) I'd be surprised if there'd be a lot of need to go outside that.
The layout issue is really an intrinsic problem with almost any word processor. Primarily because such programs are not made for page layout work. I've had just as many issues with transferring word files between various platforms ( win <-> mac). If you want your layout to be accurate, only transfer files in PDF with the fonts embedded or just create them in indesign or some other application that is actually designed for layout work.
Most civil servants use Excel more than Word, and I think that scalc is way easier to use than Excel, precisely because it doesn't try to be helpful. Excel has so many stupid rules about auto-correct and special paste that I just can't get what I need to done.
Word is still better than swriter, but not by a margin that I care about, and the fact that I have one-click PDF generation by default is a pretty killer feature, in my eyes.
This 'getting used to' phase also applies to the Microsoft ribbon[1]. And all the differences from NT-XP-Vista-7.
Moreover, it's more likely that the GUI can be forced to be stable on Linux, while the underlying system receives security updates, because of the separation of components.
[1] Right now, the keystrokes I know for Microsoft Excel still work, but they bear no relationship to the UI at all.
On a parallel anecdote. Installing Ubuntu on my parents PC sure did reduce the amount of assistance they needed from me with crashes and malware. I'd recommend it to anyone who needs to spend some time helping non-tech friends with computer problems :)
My parents use my old PC with Athlon 2000 and 512 MB RAM, I've instaled last Kubuntu with KDE 3.5 a few years ago, and never needed to touch it since then :)
The only problem so far is - once a year they need to use free windows-only application, that doesn't run in WINE, to calculate taxes. They just go to neighborns for a few hours.
My sister also has Kubuntu on her laptop, but she knows how to update it, so I don't know which version she runs now :)
If your relatives only use computer to browse web and write simple documents - linux requires less maintanance. At least that's my experience.
This mirrors my experience. I was really surprised with my parents reaction to Ubuntu. They found Unity easier to understand than Windows. It has opened up a whole new world to them. Before they barely touched the PC, now they email relatives on a regular basis and have switched over the using government and banking services online. As an added bonus I now rarely get calls for unpaid tech support.
Agree. I Installed Ubuntu to my girlsfrind and it was running 1 year without destruction. On the other hand I've taken away administration priviledges from my dads windows 7 and its holding pretty well ...
I did the same thing on my mothers laptop a couple of years ago, but switched back to Windows a few month later after far too many complaints of "I can't view this document/power point someone emailed me" and "people can't view the document/power point I e-mailed them".
Yes. And 6 years (2006 the migration started) is far from "nearly a decade" if I can trust my math. The Munich migration has been attacked, downplayed, doomed for as long as it is running. The article here gives some hard data based on a reply to a request from the opposing political party in Munich that hoped to get some ammo to attack the migration. Instead they got well researched data that shows the opposite - so far they are absolutely in budget, saved 30-60% of costs (as planned), reduced support costs (as hoped) and created a side project called WollMux that tremendously helps in migrating the VB cruft and macro ridden templates that accumulated over the past 10-15 years into a reusable library of centralized functions.
They "deduplicated" a lot of redundant forms (one little example: The act of asking for PTO was implemented in 45(!) different forms depending where you work in Munich - now it is one single unified service for all) and by centralising stuff they can now do useful statistics that simply didn't exist before.
The focus on Open Standards starts saving a lot of time and money in the archives already.
(Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, have been involved privately in the migration a bit since 2005)
The original document has the hard facts: Until 2011 they spent 11.7 Mio Euros on the migration and another 2.08 Mio Euros on workflow optimizations that they tackled at the same time. The calculated cost for a migration of the Windows NT environment to a newer windows version including support and the same workflow optimizations are at 15.52 Mio euros. That's a saving of 1.74 Mio Euros or roughly 11.2%. This is taking into account that most migration costs now have been paid, and savings will subsequently will rise. They also have anecdotical evidence that error rates and ongoing support costs have dropped. It's certainly anything but a canonical example for a botched project.
Does anyone think that large organisations will tend to move to Web-browser based business applications over the next few years?
Yes. We're upgrading (slowly but certainly) JDE and it gets rid of all the fat / skinny clients in favor of Web. Which has been the trend in ERP for a few years now.
I don't know if it's a good idea or not - people (coughmanagement*) seem to underestimate the amount of resources ops needs to maintain large farms of web servers in the enterprise.
On the other hand, for a few years I was responsible for a bar-code server, which had it's own client to install and that was a white-line nightmare, let me tell you. I don't miss it at all.
An accountants firm I was working for 7 years ago was moving that way. It started when they had to upgrade their time and fees software to being browser based. It was far from perfect, but it logically made so much sense. Once they thought about it, it seemed the logical way to go for everything, so they set it as a long term goal. Dunno how far they got, I packed in working at that time. (nothing to do with any of that)
My employer thinks that lots of people will switch to using remote `cloud-based' applications. Including web-browser based, but also using custom-clients. But then, they are in the business of selling those remote app software.
Even in small organisations, at least two projects I have now been involved with have been migrating legacy desktop applications to rich HTML/XUL websites. It's definitely where the smart money is in terms of accessibility.
Maybe interesting as well: Dave Richards is aggregated on planet.gnome.org with his work blog [1] about running the infrastructure of the city of Largo, Florida [2] (granted, far from the size of Munich). Time frame seems similar (since 2006) and his blog contains quite a bit of technical information about the challenges of running a city wide thin client network and the custom software they create for their users.
Its a fun read to learn about how many instances of Firefox you can run on a single machine at any given time as well..
It would be interesting to measure the number of complaints that were based on experimentation due to users' familiarity with Windows. Since the LiMux environment is probably more restrictive, is it possible some folks just gave up on some features, e.g. "How do I attach my Excel doc to an email?" because there is no Excel, for example. It's great that they are saving the tax-payer , though.
For counter arguments there's some fascinating stuff at http://limuxwatch.blogspot.co.uk/ although it hasn't been updated for a while, so maybe they've finally succeeded?
Yeah, if you read that site you'll see that the Munich switch was really mismanaged and underestimated. This press release sounds more like pr spin then anything, since they we supposed to be done a very long time ago
Replacing MS Office with Libre Office, especially based on comments so far seem to be not that great choice. People not calling support, it might be tu number of reasons. I bet if they did survey on what people think about impact on their work, they would get different results.
I was thinking and Google Docs would probably be better choice as alternative to MS, however, this is just another provider ie. you don't get open source.
I am all for open source, and cities like Munich getting into it is welcome news, and will influence improvement in apps, however I suspect there is a lot of negativity pushed under the rug here.
The subheading of the linked article, "Monthly IT complaints dropped from 70 to a maximum of 4" is contradicted in the article text. The text of the article says that the "maximum number of complaints" per month dropped from 70 to 46, not 4.
(Also, the maximum number of complaints is irrelevant, but I guess complaining here about people not understanding statistics is pointless.)
I love Linux myself, and I have no doubt that they've saved money, but the following makes me a little concerned about how they are going about Service Management:
"Ude said it was impossible to be exact about the amount of complaints the help desk gets about LiMux, noting that most problems are a combination of several causes. The software is not always the problem, since often there are problems reaching a server, or Internet connections might be malfunctioning."
My concern here is that they aren't logging incidents via some sort of appropriate iTSM framework (MOF, ITILv3, etc.) Even the most basic Incident Management setups would allow them to perform basic analysis of the incident data to work out where there issues are coming from.
I'm afraid I just don't buy the argument that it's impossible to know for certain where the city's problems are coming from :(
I'm speculating a little here, but there might be legal restrictions keeping them from reaching that goal. The basic argument is that any tool that may be used to track work performance (such as a tool tracking user errors) may be abused to control the employees work and thus may need union approval. I've run into this issue multiple times when doing work for government or government-like institutions in germany, once in pretty much the same constellation: A tool for defect tracking in IT was shot down because the union was afraid that it might be used to single out low-performing employees by tracking their computer problems. (sounds silly, I agree, but we're talking germany and we do have our own standards of sillyness.)
[+] [-] cs702|14 years ago|reply
The data presented in the article provides compelling evidence that the answer is yes -- i.e., the migration's recurring savings exceed its upfront costs:
* The city no longer has to pay for license upgrades, thereby eliminating a major recurring cost forever -- savings of nearly 3 million pounds every three to four years, according to the article. That's huge.
* The city no longer has to upgrade desktop software or hardware as frequently, reducing another recurring cost forever -- also huge.
* Most surprisingly, the city claims its IT department is fielding considerably fewer user complaints with Linux than with Windows, reducing another major cost forever. Labor-intensive IT support is always the costliest component of operating a corporate desktop, so that's also huge.
If the recurring cost savings claimed by the city of Munich are accurate, every budget-strapped city in the planet should be seriously considering this kind of migration to desktop Linux. It makes a lot of sense purely from a financial standpoint.
[UPDATE: I toned down the language and corrected key figures, which were off by an order of magnitude due to an incorrect reading of the article. I also materially changed the bullet point regarding support costs, as the article itself was slightly misleading on the matter. THANK YOU Xylakant and luser001 for pointing out my errors!]
[+] [-] bdunbar|14 years ago|reply
When I hear that metric I think of a homegrown app that was supposed to upload files from PeeCees to the company's mainframe. At the annual IT meeting ...
"And since implementing change foo and bar in the system user complaints to the special helpdesk have declined 90% .."
My boss stood up [1] "That's because the users got tired of calling and not having anything fixed. It's still broken."
The manager/presenter shot daggers at Eric [1]. Cross-hall verbal sniping started. Entertaining.
[1] He was retiring in a few months.
[+] [-] Argorak|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wccrawford|14 years ago|reply
It starts with 'Bobby in accounting told me to X when Y happens' and snowballs from there.
It's horrible on productivity and when IT finally does try to fix it, it's often much, much worse. (Though, when the user gets it right, IT doesn't have to fix it after all.)
It's also horrible on morale.
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skrebbel|14 years ago|reply
Take 12000 civil servants losing one hour a week on fighting the tools, and you get to 11.7 million pretty fast.
[+] [-] rbanffy|14 years ago|reply
At least with Outlook I solved the problem backing up via IMAP to my own server, who kept the mailbox in a very easy to manage maildir folder. The usual Office workaround - opening with OpenOffice and saving back to Office format - never worked for me after 2008 and backups had to be used.
[+] [-] doktrin|14 years ago|reply
Frankly, I would go so far as to say that a Linux desktop OS is really only appropriate for enthusiasts or those with minimal needs (e.g. email). For just about anyone else, there is simply too much potential hassle involved in getting the basics to work (external displays, anyone?).
[+] [-] kaolinite|14 years ago|reply
I've introduced a number of people now to OpenOffice and they've much preferred it as it has given them back a somewhat familiar interface, after the widely-despised change to ribbon (a UI I actually prefer but it was a shock to many).
[+] [-] ams6110|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbell|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debacle|14 years ago|reply
Word is still better than swriter, but not by a margin that I care about, and the fact that I have one-click PDF generation by default is a pretty killer feature, in my eyes.
[+] [-] jimktrains2|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdda|14 years ago|reply
Moreover, it's more likely that the GUI can be forced to be stable on Linux, while the underlying system receives security updates, because of the separation of components.
[1] Right now, the keystrokes I know for Microsoft Excel still work, but they bear no relationship to the UI at all.
[+] [-] vibrunazo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajuc|14 years ago|reply
The only problem so far is - once a year they need to use free windows-only application, that doesn't run in WINE, to calculate taxes. They just go to neighborns for a few hours.
My sister also has Kubuntu on her laptop, but she knows how to update it, so I don't know which version she runs now :)
If your relatives only use computer to browse web and write simple documents - linux requires less maintanance. At least that's my experience.
[+] [-] kiloaper|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maarty|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dagw|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggy2011|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fleitz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|14 years ago|reply
The Munich migration is pretty much the canonical example of how to botch a Linux migration.
[+] [-] jwildeboer|14 years ago|reply
They "deduplicated" a lot of redundant forms (one little example: The act of asking for PTO was implemented in 45(!) different forms depending where you work in Munich - now it is one single unified service for all) and by centralising stuff they can now do useful statistics that simply didn't exist before.
The focus on Open Standards starts saving a lot of time and money in the archives already.
(Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, have been involved privately in the migration a bit since 2005)
[+] [-] Xylakant|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithpeter|14 years ago|reply
Does anyone think that large organisations will tend to move to Web-browser based business applications over the next few years?
If so, will that make it easier to switch the client device without major change in the central plumbing?
[+] [-] bdunbar|14 years ago|reply
Yes. We're upgrading (slowly but certainly) JDE and it gets rid of all the fat / skinny clients in favor of Web. Which has been the trend in ERP for a few years now.
I don't know if it's a good idea or not - people (coughmanagement*) seem to underestimate the amount of resources ops needs to maintain large farms of web servers in the enterprise.
On the other hand, for a few years I was responsible for a bar-code server, which had it's own client to install and that was a white-line nightmare, let me tell you. I don't miss it at all.
[+] [-] alan_cx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eru|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hahainternet|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darklajid|14 years ago|reply
Its a fun read to learn about how many instances of Firefox you can run on a single machine at any given time as well..
1: http://davelargo.blogspot.com/
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largo,_Florida
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Argorak|14 years ago|reply
https://www.desktopsummit.org/sites/www.desktopsummit.org/fi...
They are now on 10.04.
[+] [-] FreshCode|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duncans|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drucken|14 years ago|reply
1. Completely anonymous - who is this person who has dedicated a site just to this topic?
2. Clearly neither German or even speaks German (using Google translation!) - so, we can rule out an insider or even a user.
3. Railing on all topics relating to Linux for government use anywhere on the globe without giving reasons other than quoting other sources.
As I said, not reliable and someone clearly disgruntled with no independent information or expertise (technical or managerial).
[+] [-] tosseraccount|14 years ago|reply
Sounds like a disgruntled vendor.
[+] [-] mattbriggs|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kishorgurtu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodolphoarruda|14 years ago|reply
Does anyone know details of this? Any ideas on what type of "optimisation" was done?
[+] [-] desireco42|14 years ago|reply
I am all for open source, and cities like Munich getting into it is welcome news, and will influence improvement in apps, however I suspect there is a lot of negativity pushed under the rug here.
[+] [-] pingswept|14 years ago|reply
(Also, the maximum number of complaints is irrelevant, but I guess complaining here about people not understanding statistics is pointless.)
[+] [-] click170|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azth|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbsdy|14 years ago|reply
"Ude said it was impossible to be exact about the amount of complaints the help desk gets about LiMux, noting that most problems are a combination of several causes. The software is not always the problem, since often there are problems reaching a server, or Internet connections might be malfunctioning."
My concern here is that they aren't logging incidents via some sort of appropriate iTSM framework (MOF, ITILv3, etc.) Even the most basic Incident Management setups would allow them to perform basic analysis of the incident data to work out where there issues are coming from.
I'm afraid I just don't buy the argument that it's impossible to know for certain where the city's problems are coming from :(
[+] [-] Xylakant|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] desireco42|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gitarr|14 years ago|reply