Members of the Swiss parliament (Nationalrat) say that the government's dependence on a single IT vendor for its desktop operating systems is causing a chaos and is leading to increasing IT costs.
The government three years ago decided to pay for proprietary licences in order to standardise on the then current version of Microsoft's operating system. This standardisation was estimated to save some 15 million CHF (about 9.9 million euro). However some departments now prefer to move to the company's newest edition, according to Swiss newspaper reports.
"The Federal standardisation project seems to fail", reports the Berner Zeitung on 4 December. It writes that the Defense department and the department for Economics have already been migrated to Vista, but that the Foreign Affairs office refuses, it wants to move to the latest version of Windows. And this week, the Federal IT department has to deal with more departments that refuse to move to Vista, according to the newspaper.
"The introduction of standardised desktops in the federation based on Windows Vista is a nationwide project", the Berliner Zeitung quotes Peter Fischer, responsible for the administration's IT strategy. "And with such a large project, it is only natural that when the situation changes, we should ask whether Windows 7 is a sensible option."
That approach however, is criticised by the Group for Digital Sustainability, a group of 25 parliament members that want the public administration's IT system to become more independent from IT vendors. The group, representing about 10 percent of the Swiss parliament, is calling on public organisations to increase their use of open source software.
"The federal administration will be using four versions of Windows: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7", said Edith Graf-Litscher, National councillor for the Socialist Party in a statement published on Monday. She says the forced upgrades of the operating system will lead to increasing costs. "If the administration goes on like this, it will never see the synergy that comes with using a single system."
She says that using open source would offer a more sustainable alternative. Here upgrade cycles are inherently more responsive to the needs of the users, she says. "Open source users have a freedom that prevents them to be forced to upgrade."
More information:
Statement by the group in Digital Sustainability (in German)
Berner Zeiting news item (in German)
Inside IT news item (in German)
Netz Woche news item (in German)
Computerworld news item (in German)