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These guidelines are not intended to be a Human Resource Management guide, and Administrations will have encountered many of these issues in other areas before. They will have considerable internal skills on how to overcome them in a sympathetic way and so Human Resource staff ought to be involved from an early stage. The intention here is simply to highlight the sort of issues that have arisen in other sites who have migrated to OSS.
It is very important that all staff are consulted and kept up to date with developments. One way of doing this is to create an intranet which can be easily kept current and which can have a section for user feedback.
Access to training is very important. Some sites have allowed users to decide for themselves if they want to attend whereas others have required attendance. The choice will depend on the culture of the Administration and what the training course is about. Manuals and general documentation is usually only in English and this might cause a problem with some staff. Translation to the local language might be considered as a migration cost but there will then be the problem of the continuing translation of updates.
The OSS user interface in particular Gnome and KDE provides a choice of languages but the translation may not be complete with some menu items and help screens still in English. Gnome in particular has good accessibility features for the visually impaired. Also not all applications will have full localisation support. This is all changing rapidly though and the structure to allow the use of a language other than English is in place if the Administration wants to use it.
There are a number of classic reactions to any change to working practices which will need to be planned for:
Fear of the Unknown
The use of OSS will be completely new to most users and systems staff. The natural fear of the unknown will mean that people will resist OSS because it is new to them.
There will be users, who are more naturally inquisitive, who may be very happy to try the new and it is these who should be introduced to OSS in the first instance. The experience so far indicates that once people get over their reserve they find that OSS is not significantly different to use than proprietary software and they become quite happy to use it. It is likely therefore that this initial group of users will successfully transfer to OSS enthusiastically. In any case these people are also likely to ones who will provide useful feedback.
The first group of users could be used in pilot trials and once they have experience they can be used to coax and educate their colleagues. In any case, in the second phase, users who may be more reserved will need to have greater support facilities in the form of help desks, intranets and experienced local users.
The same process can be used for systems staff but the level of training is likely to be significant if the existing proprietary environment is not like UNIX. The systems staff in particular need to have their fears allayed at an early stage. They will be a focal point for all the problems that are bound to occur and if they do not believe in the project they will not be able to encourage users in a positive way.
The CV dilution effect
Both systems staff and users may feel that not using the “industry standard” software will impair their ability to develop their career. This is a tricky problem which needs careful management. The Administration will not want to appear heavy handed in its approach but until OSS is widely used then Administrations may encounter this problem quite often.
Knowledge is power
The people who know the existing systems and setup have a certain amount of power and they may be very reluctant to give this up if the OSS environment is very different from the existing one. This is again requires careful management as these people do have a critical role in running the existing systems. They may need to be among the first to be trained in the new systems so that their position in the organisation is maintained.