French Minister of Budget François Baroin just launched the second phase of the “General Review of Public Policies” program, aiming to modernize the French administration and to cut public spending by €10 billion.

150 new measures [in French] have been adopted for the 2011-2013 period.  Most of these are set to enhance quality of service to the public. In addition to cutting 100,000 positions in the public sector, these measures encourage a massive use of the Internet to rationalize the public’s dealings with the administration, while reducing associated costs by €300 million.

In addition, after the United States and United Kingdom, France is the third country (to my knowledge) to be announcing the nomination of a “State CIO”, whose missions will be, among others, to optimize IT Support within the whole administration and to centralize public purchase (which should bring an additional €700 million in savings). If IT back office is said to be rationalized, enhancing Internet front-office and associated applications will also help to simplify legal declarations for both enterprises and private individuals.

This nomination and 150 measures are really good news for French citizens, as the State CIO will be instrumental to anchor IT at the center of the public services, with a lot of e-administration programs to be launched or enhanced.

This news is also great for the open source world: if I understand correctly, the French government is aiming to boost quality of service while reducing costs. And to succeed, I don’t see many other alternatives than relying on open source solutions! I cannot imagine a government – which is planning to cut costs – deciding to select expensive and inflexible systems offered by proprietary vendors.

For more than 5 years, companies such as Talend have helped hundreds of public sector organizations industrialize their IT projects, cutting costs and gaining agility. It seems that it was only a beginning.

Bertrand

CIOs point of view on open source is clearly evolving. Four years ago, the word on the street was that open source solutions were insecure, riddled with amateurish support, and we were hearing that the viability of OSS companies was a wild bet at best… Of course the spreading of FUD by proprietary vendors did not help.

Readers of this blog know that I always feel important to make it clear that open source is not only a way to cut costs. Hence the interest I found in the report on the first Open CIO Summit, organized by the Open World Forum in Paris in late 2009.

According to this report, CIOs regard OSS more as a source of innovation than as a way to directly save budget. If open source is often portrayed as a way to cut cost, CIO Summit participants give this cliché a pounding: they consider that the main benefit of open source is to help them to innovate easily in their IT, combining various elements: a dynamic ecosystem, the availability of a broad variety of software functions, modularity, compliance with standards, easy access, customization capabilities, and of course, lower costs. With OSS, they can test alternative options, without risk.

Secondly, the main interest offered by OSS lies more on standards and flexibility than code openness. CIOs know that code openness is a guarantee of customization and security, but they feel more attracted by standards compliance to guarantee flexibility and interoperability. OSS can be customized more easily than proprietary software, and OSS vendors are faster to take into account clients needs.

Finally, the main barrier slowing down the adoption of OSS seems to be usability: user interfaces of OSS tools have to be enhanced, in terms of ergonomics and design. OSS products have the reputation to be developed by technicians for technicians. And moreover, if adoption fails, the enterprise goes back to proprietary software with no second chance for OSS… This last point is quite important, and we addressed it from day one, in the very first versions of our products. I guess we succeeded: Talend customers often underline the ease of use and speed of learning of our tools in the case studies.

The report concludes that for CIOs, OSS is more an opportunity than a risk, if the enterprise knows how to manage best practices – which is essential in a quite tough economic environment. Of course, this is nothing new for us at Talend.  But this level of awareness (92% of CIOs are now using open source solutions or tools) is clearly encouraging.

Bertrand