There is a lot of talk recently about alternatives to Microsoft's desktop applications, see my recent posting “Pursuing An Open Desktop, Why Not!” as well as “P&G Flirts with Google Apps and Scares the Bejesus Out of Microsoft” posted by Tom Wailgum on October 1st, “Fighting Government Waste One Google Application At A Time”, and “Cost Savings Found When Microsoft Outlook Ousted for Gmail at British Construction Firm”.
The Open Office desktop and Google Apps are only the beginning of a readily growing availability of software alternatives. Compiere's ERP and CRM applications, SugarCRM's relationship management application, OpenWorkbench from Computer Associates, Mozilla Firefox web browser, Openbravo ERP and many other can be found on Wikipedia. The point is that many of the most sophisticated enterprise applications are now becoming available through an open source provider.
Why is this important? Let me share a personal experience. It was June and the Oregon Department of Human Services was going to implement the new HIPAA compliant codes for our Medicaid application in January of the coming year. This had a significant impact on our health care partners, since they had to modify their systems in order to be able to submit electronic invoices to the State. If our partners didn't update their systems before January they would have to file paper invoices, which we estimated would increase the States workload by around 60,000 paper invoices per month.
As we investigated the situation, we discovered that a number of different State employees were coordinating communications with various health care providers, there was no central repository of this information and follow up information was being kept on sticky notes. There was a clear need for a relation management application, but with only six months to get this job done there was no time to go through the traditional procurement process to procure and implement potential solutions such as Siebold or SalesForce.com.
One of our top system architects came to our rescue when he discovered SugarCRM's application on the Internet and since it was an open source application he was able to download and install it in a single day. Our customers loved it and since it was an open source application we were able to make some minor modifications (mostly to screen literals) and have it in production within days. We were also able to download contact information from our mainframes and create a comprehensive partner database.
The bottom line was that when we went live with the HIPAA compliant transactions and code sets almost every electronic filler was ready and there was almost no increase in paper invoice volumes. While the cost savings were substantial the speed in which we able to meet everyone's needs was the big payoff.
As a CIO you need to be investigating these open source and other alternative software options. Next posting will discuss what I see as the biggest payoff from the open source development model and that is collaborative development of none strategic applications.
source:- advice.cio.com/
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