I just read a blog post by Matt Asay entitled “Open source and the future of vendor-free IT” that got me thinking about the state of my organization.

The majority of our infrastructure is built around vendor supported, proprietary solutions. While some of our services are hosted on Linux servers (also vendor backed), my understanding is that we default to Windows-based servers when that option is available. I assume a large portion of our budget is spent on licensing silos containing redundant components. For example, we have Onbase, DocuShare, SharePoint, Cascade (WCM), and Blackboard (LMS) supported within our organization and I’m sure there are other similar solutions in place elsewhere in the institution. There is a great deal of overlap here and a limited ability to integrate these solutions. I’m sure I’m trivializing the issues involved, but I strongly believe it is possible to build an infrastructure around best-of-breed open source components to reduce/eliminate the redundancy and greatly streamline data management. I’m not suggesting this is easy, but I believe the organization would benefit more by taking on such a project then continuing to pay several vendors to compete amongst one another.

I generally get the impression that IT decision-makers believe there is something special about vendors, and that institutional IT can’t possibly provide a matching level of service/support. This is certainly the case with the proprietary solutions we use because they are closed and we MUST buy expertise and information. I my opinion, we have done our organizations a disservice by restricting technical knowledge to that exposed by vendors; by paying vendors to become experts and do our thinking for us. Consider the alternative where we use our money to educate our IT staff, to hire open source experts and invest in solutions that can be studied and understood without a contract. Knowing that we’re not the only institution dealing with vendor limitations, wouldn’t it be wiser to partner with other organizations dealing with the very same issues (who are also paying the same vendors) to share cost and collaborate on more effective solutions? There was a recent EDUCAUSE article discussing the importance of social learning that suggests the beneficial growth such a project would have for our IT staff.