I spent 7 years working with digitalisation in the Danish public sector and it depends on what you mean, and what you want to pay for it. Basically the short answer is that it is impossible.
What is often forgotten about non-tech enterprise here on HN is that a typical public sector organisation has a ratio of 20-50 IT people (this is everyone, from the network and operations people to developers and project managers) per 10.000 employees in organisation where almost every employee uses some form of IT system to perform their duty.
Some users will not be capable of telling you if they are on an iOS or Android devices, and almost all of them know Microsoft Office and Outlook because that is what every place they have ever worked and will ever work uses. Or to frame it differently, the change management and retraining of 10000 employees is going to crush you, very, very quickly. On top of that your IT staff is certified and trained with Microsoft technologies, and most of them are likely happy about that to the point where they will leave your organisation if you push them toward Linux.
That is the employees. There is also the technology, and all the IT systems that only works on windows and have no competitors. This can be everything from your million dollar MRI machine to the dentist program (dentists are part of the public sector in Denmark). Cutting ties with Microsoft completely, would mean you’d need someone to develop alternatives to these things. (Yes, your million dollar MRI machine shouldn’t depend on windows XP, but it does).
So obviously it’s not impossible, nothing is, it’s just really, really, expensive. It’s so expensive that it will likely be it would be political suicide because the money you need to pay for the transition is going to come from firing nurses, school teachers, and other primary functions.
That being said, a lot of public sector organisations do take open source seriously. Especially here in Europe. But there isn’t a clean way to cut ties with Microsoft, and it’s actually become harder and harder. Because where is the Linux alternative to office365?
Disclaimer: I consider Microsoft to be the best external business partner that I’ve worked with while I was in the public sector.
The other challenge in the public sector is that the "business" itself is so heterogeneous that the IT management tends to be siloed, while people in these siloed orgs need to work with people in other siloed orgs. You can't switch the whole government wholesale; you'll get some fraction of business units to adopt something else and hope other units will slowly switch too, but in the meantime, you've got people trying to share documents with some intricate set of track changes, comments or some other special feature across orgs using different tech, and the roundtripping with different software causes some of that to be messed up and then you've got an ongoing IT support problem and dissatisfied stakeholders.
I think the biggest issue will be finding an organisation that actually wants to replace Microsoft.
I know there are a few examples of it happening, but one of the reasons Microsoft is so successful is because they actually sell a really nice product with some really good support. This isn’t true for you or me as private customers, but when I was working in an average sized Danish City our IT department had a direct line to Seattle, and not only would they sometimes change Office365 or Azure in ways that we suggested, they would call you every hour with updates during major incidents. Part of what Microsoft sells to enterprise organisations is the ability for IT management to tell their organisation that Microsoft is giving them personal hourly updates while outlook is down.
As bad as bribes are, I don’t think they are going to move public opinion enough for politicians (or anyone else really) to push for alternatives. In fact, I doubt I’ll be reading about this outside of HN, as sad as that may be.
I do use Office365 on linux, I even develop Office plugins under Linux. So it would seem like a transition to cloud software would be the enabler of Linux based operating systems?
It sounds like it's always gonna be a messy migration, but I wonder if you can somewhat simplify it by moving all users to web apps? Basically as an intermediate transition step to first decouple usage from the underlying OS.
What is often forgotten about non-tech enterprise here on HN is that a typical public sector organisation has a ratio of 20-50 IT people (this is everyone, from the network and operations people to developers and project managers) per 10.000 employees in organisation where almost every employee uses some form of IT system to perform their duty.
Some users will not be capable of telling you if they are on an iOS or Android devices, and almost all of them know Microsoft Office and Outlook because that is what every place they have ever worked and will ever work uses. Or to frame it differently, the change management and retraining of 10000 employees is going to crush you, very, very quickly. On top of that your IT staff is certified and trained with Microsoft technologies, and most of them are likely happy about that to the point where they will leave your organisation if you push them toward Linux.
That is the employees. There is also the technology, and all the IT systems that only works on windows and have no competitors. This can be everything from your million dollar MRI machine to the dentist program (dentists are part of the public sector in Denmark). Cutting ties with Microsoft completely, would mean you’d need someone to develop alternatives to these things. (Yes, your million dollar MRI machine shouldn’t depend on windows XP, but it does).
So obviously it’s not impossible, nothing is, it’s just really, really, expensive. It’s so expensive that it will likely be it would be political suicide because the money you need to pay for the transition is going to come from firing nurses, school teachers, and other primary functions.
That being said, a lot of public sector organisations do take open source seriously. Especially here in Europe. But there isn’t a clean way to cut ties with Microsoft, and it’s actually become harder and harder. Because where is the Linux alternative to office365?
Disclaimer: I consider Microsoft to be the best external business partner that I’ve worked with while I was in the public sector.