Open Source Software: The South African Government's Struggle to Migrate

The South African (SA) Cabinet approved an OSS policy in 2007, declaring OSS the preferred government software choice. In spite of all the potential benefits highlighted in the literature, the uptake and migration processes have been extremely sluggish. This paper reports on the possible reasons for the slow uptake. Unstructured interviews were used to construct two case studies on the migration activities and events in two of the departments. It was found that both departments were driven to migrate by the policy; a desire to save on IT costs; the possibility to escape from vendor lock-ins; and the capability of OSS to address the shortcomings of current legacy systems. Challenges faced were user resistance; a lack of adequate skills; a lack of support by the appointed facilitation agency; and a lack of complete OSS product documentation. The paper concludes with practical recommendations on how to accelerate the OSS migration process.