"Linux switch saved city millions and reduced user complaints"

http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/public-sector/3348475/munich-mayor-says-switch-linux-is-much-cheaper-reduced-complaints/

by EdwardQ • 14 years ago

209 135 14 years ago

computerworlduk.com

icebraining• 14 years ago

The article says it's based on Ubuntu, but the LiMux page linked by it says it's based on Debian (Sarge, no less, which is ancient nowadays).

Argorak3• 14 years ago

Since LiMux 3, its Ubuntu.

https://www.desktopsummit.org/sites/www.desktopsummit.org/fi...

They are now on 10.04.

keithpeter4• 14 years ago

Should be fun when they upgrade to 12.04. And I say that as one who quite likes Unity

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

On a parallel anecdote. Installing Ubuntu on my parents PC sure did reduce the amount of assistance they needed from me with crashes and malware. I'd recommend it to anyone who needs to spend some time helping non-tech friends with computer problems :)

maarty• 14 years ago

Agree. I Installed Ubuntu to my girlsfrind and it was running 1 year without destruction. On the other hand I've taken away administration priviledges from my dads windows 7 and its holding pretty well ...

rbanffy10• 14 years ago

For my wife, I advised a move to Mac. She needed perfect MS Office compatibility for professional reasons and the computers are much prettier.

dagw• 14 years ago

I did the same thing on my mothers laptop a couple of years ago, but switched back to Windows a few month later after far too many complaints of "I can't view this document/power point someone emailed me" and "people can't view the document/power point I e-mailed them".

rbanffy10• 14 years ago

Interesting... My mom seems perfectly happy with LibreOffice. I also set her up with Gmail, so she can view the PowerPoint files without launching LO.

sarvinc• 14 years ago

I imagine this is exactly how it would go down if I installed Linux on my parent's computers. I think the key here is administration (at least until Linux is supported by 3rd party consumer companies). You can't move a company to a different OS without great IT support.

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

Until they call up asking how to get netflix to work

rbanffy10• 14 years ago

I'd then buy my mom a more modern DVD player. Watching movies on the computer is not for my mom at least and her TV is 9 times larger than her current computer screen (sadly, her 21" Integraph started to misbehave after 15 years)

amcintyre• 14 years ago

If they've got a monitor/TV that's compatible with a Roku, just spend the $60 for that.

ajuc2• 14 years ago

My parents use my old PC with Athlon 2000 and 512 MB RAM, I've instaled last Kubuntu with KDE 3.5 a few years ago, and never needed to touch it since then :)

The only problem so far is - once a year they need to use free windows-only application, that doesn't run in WINE, to calculate taxes. They just go to neighborns for a few hours.

My sister also has Kubuntu on her laptop, but she knows how to update it, so I don't know which version she runs now :)

If your relatives only use computer to browse web and write simple documents - linux requires less maintanance. At least that's my experience.

aerique• 14 years ago

There's always VirtualBox for such things, but it might perhaps not run well enough on a slow, old PC.

ttt_• 14 years ago

Interestingly, as more government entities adopt linux and foss in general, they have a lot more incentive to provide support for that. So maybe in a couple years these government-issued software will target linux distros.

Splines3• 14 years ago

> The only problem so far is - once a year they need to use free windows-only application, that doesn't run in WINE, to calculate taxes. They just go to neighborns for a few hours.

If you're in the US, I've been using the web app tax software and it's been great. Nothing to install locally and my progress is always saved. Maybe not for you if you are in a complex tax situation, but if your life is simple doing it online is incredibly easy.

kiloaper• 14 years ago

This mirrors my experience. I was really surprised with my parents reaction to Ubuntu. They found Unity easier to understand than Windows. It has opened up a whole new world to them. Before they barely touched the PC, now they email relatives on a regular basis and have switched over the using government and banking services online. As an added bonus I now rarely get calls for unpaid tech support.

duncans• 14 years ago

For counter arguments there's some fascinating stuff at http://limuxwatch.blogspot.co.uk/ although it hasn't been updated for a while, so maybe they've finally succeeded?

tosseraccount• 14 years ago

"Watching the city of Munich fail to convert to Linux" At least they post their bias upfront.

Sounds like a disgruntled vendor.

mattbriggs• 14 years ago

Yeah, if you read that site you'll see that the Munich switch was really mismanaged and underestimated. This press release sounds more like pr spin then anything, since they we supposed to be done a very long time ago

st0p• 14 years ago

If every large IT project would be regarded as failed because it was delivered late, the chances of a successfull project would approach zero.

Xylakant12• 14 years ago

Actually, the article is not based on a press release. The original document is a response of the cities administration to a question brought up in the cities council chamber. The question was brought up because Vienna obviously stopped its WieMux migration.

flomo3• 14 years ago

My understanding is that Munich had a lot of issues which were orthogonal to Linux - decentralized support, lack of inventory, lack of standards. Of course, it didn't help that the original proponents were of an 'ideological' bent and perhaps bit off more than they could chew.

Either way, a 9 year IT project is really dismal.

drucken2• 14 years ago

Hardly the most reliable or even useful of sites.

1. Completely anonymous - who is this person who has dedicated a site just to this topic?

2. Clearly neither German or even speaks German (using Google translation!) - so, we can rule out an insider or even a user.

3. Railing on all topics relating to Linux for government use anywhere on the globe without giving reasons other than quoting other sources.

As I said, not reliable and someone clearly disgruntled with no independent information or expertise (technical or managerial).

pingswept• 14 years ago

The subheading of the linked article, "Monthly IT complaints dropped from 70 to a maximum of 4" is contradicted in the article text. The text of the article says that the "maximum number of complaints" per month dropped from 70 to 46, not 4.

(Also, the maximum number of complaints is irrelevant, but I guess complaining here about people not understanding statistics is pointless.)

click170• 14 years ago

Looks like a very-likely spelling mistake, someone probably just forgot to type the 6.

keithpeter4• 14 years ago

Disclaimer: I'm not a programmer and have been a bystander in medium sized IT projects.

Does anyone think that large organisations will tend to move to Web-browser based business applications over the next few years?

If so, will that make it easier to switch the client device without major change in the central plumbing?

eru• 14 years ago

My employer thinks that lots of people will switch to using remote `cloud-based' applications. Including web-browser based, but also using custom-clients. But then, they are in the business of selling those remote app software.

bdunbar3• 14 years ago

Does anyone think that large organisations will tend to move to Web-browser based business applications over the next few years?

Yes. We're upgrading (slowly but certainly) JDE and it gets rid of all the fat / skinny clients in favor of Web. Which has been the trend in ERP for a few years now.

I don't know if it's a good idea or not - people (coughmanagement*) seem to underestimate the amount of resources ops needs to maintain large farms of web servers in the enterprise.

On the other hand, for a few years I was responsible for a bar-code server, which had it's own client to install and that was a white-line nightmare, let me tell you. I don't miss it at all.

alan_cx• 14 years ago

An accountants firm I was working for 7 years ago was moving that way. It started when they had to upgrade their time and fees software to being browser based. It was far from perfect, but it logically made so much sense. Once they thought about it, it seemed the logical way to go for everything, so they set it as a long term goal. Dunno how far they got, I packed in working at that time. (nothing to do with any of that)

hahainternet• 14 years ago

Even in small organisations, at least two projects I have now been involved with have been migrating legacy desktop applications to rich HTML/XUL websites. It's definitely where the smart money is in terms of accessibility.

skrebbel• 14 years ago

With these kinds of `hooray linux´ articles, I always wonder whether they included the cost of reduced productivity they included when moving everybody from MS Office to LibreOffice and stuff like that. The difference in quality, stability and features is pretty big. I've worked with LibreOffice only for about 8 months, and I can tell you, it's not just a matter of "getting used to". There's simply a whole bunch of bugs (layout screwing up in Writer, Ctrl+Z not perfectly going back to the previous state, etc) and limitations. The time wasted fighting these tools costs a lot as well.

Take 12000 civil servants losing one hour a week on fighting the tools, and you get to 11.7 million pretty fast.

jimktrains2• 14 years ago

I get layout screw-ups between versions of word, especially mac->win and vice versa.

doktrin3• 14 years ago

I agree. The FOSS office tools are simply not in the same class as Microsoft Office. Anyone who has worked extensively with Excel will acknowledge there really is no true competitor out there.

Frankly, I would go so far as to say that a Linux desktop OS is really only appropriate for enthusiasts or those with minimal needs (e.g. email). For just about anyone else, there is simply too much potential hassle involved in getting the basics to work (external displays, anyone?).

viandante5• 14 years ago

Frankly, I would say just the opposite. If your needs are minimal, go with windows. If you need more, linux is a good choice. You will never get a decent terminal in windows or good support for some programming languages (such as python).

You are right with Excel although. However, much of the "power" of Excel is really just needed because people are overusing it. Stop making "databases" out of Excel sheets and implement good data analytics system on the server and you'll see that libreoffice is more than enough.

kaolinite2• 14 years ago

Personally I find that techies are the hardest to rip away from Office, as they can see all the little bugs, etc. Non-technical people seem to - somehow - overlook these.

I've introduced a number of people now to OpenOffice and they've much preferred it as it has given them back a somewhat familiar interface, after the widely-despised change to ribbon (a UI I actually prefer but it was a shock to many).

mbell• 14 years ago

The layout issue is really an intrinsic problem with almost any word processor. Primarily because such programs are not made for page layout work. I've had just as many issues with transferring word files between various platforms ( win <-> mac). If you want your layout to be accurate, only transfer files in PDF with the fonts embedded or just create them in indesign or some other application that is actually designed for layout work.

rbanffy10• 14 years ago

You seem to neglect the fact Office users routinely experience problems with their own documents and programs. Who never had a Word document that, after some heavy editing, refused to load? I have, many times, since the first version of Word for Windows. I've abandoned Office between 2002 and 2008 and, to my surprise, I still had those problems with Word, Project and Outlook (when I had to clean PST files more than once).

At least with Outlook I solved the problem backing up via IMAP to my own server, who kept the mailbox in a very easy to manage maildir folder. The usual Office workaround - opening with OpenOffice and saving back to Office format - never worked for me after 2008 and backups had to be used.

excerionsforte2• 14 years ago

When speaking from your experience its easy to say 'many' users have had problems, just like how I can say I've never had a problem with a word document therefore 'many' users have never had a problem with a word document. :) Not sure what kind of editing you do. haha

debacle• 14 years ago

Most civil servants use Excel more than Word, and I think that scalc is way easier to use than Excel, precisely because it doesn't try to be helpful. Excel has so many stupid rules about auto-correct and special paste that I just can't get what I need to done.

Word is still better than swriter, but not by a margin that I care about, and the fact that I have one-click PDF generation by default is a pretty killer feature, in my eyes.

ams61102• 14 years ago

I agree that LibreOffice is not an equal to MS Office, but I wonder how many civil servants are doing a lot of original work in an office suite. Seems to me that most of what they would be doing is filling out forms and using other standard templates. Given a suite of working, debugged templates (which seems to be what the "WollMux" extension supplies) I'd be surprised if there'd be a lot of need to go outside that.

mdda• 14 years ago

This 'getting used to' phase also applies to the Microsoft ribbon[1]. And all the differences from NT-XP-Vista-7.

Moreover, it's more likely that the GUI can be forced to be stable on Linux, while the underlying system receives security updates, because of the separation of components.

[1] Right now, the keystrokes I know for Microsoft Excel still work, but they bear no relationship to the UI at all.

FreshCode• 14 years ago

It would be interesting to measure the number of complaints that were based on experimentation due to users' familiarity with Windows. Since the LiMux environment is probably more restrictive, is it possible some folks just gave up on some features, e.g. "How do I attach my Excel doc to an email?" because there is no Excel, for example. It's great that they are saving the tax-payer , though.

rodolphoarruda• 14 years ago

"[...] €2.08 million (£1.73 million) for optimisation and test management that ended up on the balance of the LiMux project [...]"

Does anyone know details of this? Any ideas on what type of "optimisation" was done?

ccozan2• 14 years ago

Lived in Munich for a good while so I know some of it. Most of the optimization and test went on working with documents. They had a lot of excel/doc stuff which was programmed in VB so they had to migrate, reproduce and test them in OpenOffice ( well, now LibreOffice ). Rest went in intregration and desktop.

I recommend reading this: http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/studies/declaration-inde...

tbsdy• 14 years ago

I love Linux myself, and I have no doubt that they've saved money, but the following makes me a little concerned about how they are going about Service Management:

"Ude said it was impossible to be exact about the amount of complaints the help desk gets about LiMux, noting that most problems are a combination of several causes. The software is not always the problem, since often there are problems reaching a server, or Internet connections might be malfunctioning."

My concern here is that they aren't logging incidents via some sort of appropriate iTSM framework (MOF, ITILv3, etc.) Even the most basic Incident Management setups would allow them to perform basic analysis of the incident data to work out where there issues are coming from.

I'm afraid I just don't buy the argument that it's impossible to know for certain where the city's problems are coming from :(

Xylakant12• 14 years ago

I'm speculating a little here, but there might be legal restrictions keeping them from reaching that goal. The basic argument is that any tool that may be used to track work performance (such as a tool tracking user errors) may be abused to control the employees work and thus may need union approval. I've run into this issue multiple times when doing work for government or government-like institutions in germany, once in pretty much the same constellation: A tool for defect tracking in IT was shot down because the union was afraid that it might be used to single out low-performing employees by tracking their computer problems. (sounds silly, I agree, but we're talking germany and we do have our own standards of sillyness.)

bdunbar3• 14 years ago

"... and reduced user complaints"

When I hear that metric I think of a homegrown app that was supposed to upload files from PeeCees to the company's mainframe. At the annual IT meeting ...

"And since implementing change foo and bar in the system user complaints to the special helpdesk have declined 90% .."

My boss stood up [1] "That's because the users got tired of calling and not having anything fixed. It's still broken."

The manager/presenter shot daggers at Eric [1]. Cross-hall verbal sniping started. Entertaining.

[1] He was retiring in a few months.

Argorak3• 14 years ago

I had some colleagues use the alpha of a new shiny thing the company was building. But none of them ever reported bugs to the bug tracker, because it was "too complicated and nothing ever happened". So the company had someone flying down to our offices and do a presentation on how the (homegrown) bug tracker works. It was a simple, 18-step process just to file a bug... turned out, it was even worse for developers handling those bugs. Yet, people pointing that out where looked at like the were from mars :/.

wccrawford• 14 years ago

Your boss had a good point. At some point, users become savvy to the whole thing and stop complaining and start trying to fix it on their own.

It starts with 'Bobby in accounting told me to X when Y happens' and snowballs from there.

It's horrible on productivity and when IT finally does try to fix it, it's often much, much worse. (Though, when the user gets it right, IT doesn't have to fix it after all.)

It's also horrible on morale.

ams61102• 14 years ago

Or they will stop using the system altogether and that's when you start having these unofficial shadow systems spring up, developed by someone who read Access For Dummies in 7 Days, and next thing you know you've got 250,000 credit card numbers posted on pastebin.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

There is a correlated phenomenon that might be at work: many help desk calls are a result of what happens after a user tries to "fix it" themselves. Users may be sufficiently ignorant under Linux that they've reduced the number of steps they take "outside the box".

fleitz• 14 years ago

They moved from Windows NT to Linux in 2006. No wonder it reduced complaints. I'd be far more interested in a migration from Win 7 or Win XP to Linux.

ccozan2• 14 years ago

I think the main reason was independence from vendors - since they were based on NT and Microsoft just pulled the support - ouch!, not necessarily nicety or features of a desktop. The whole infrastructure was changed and not just some frontend.

eropple• 14 years ago

Microsoft didn't "just pull support" from NT. The lifecycle was pretty well defined.

rhizome• 14 years ago

I can't find a reference right now, but in 2003-2006 there was a huge jump in license costs for Microsoft customers.

cs7022• 14 years ago

Doubtlessly, this successful migration to desktop Linux must have been very difficult, costly, and disruptive. The upfront costs of migration surely exceed what it would have cost the city to stay on Windows for one or two more waves of upgrades. The important question is: were these upfront costs & multi-year effort worth it?

The data presented in the article provides compelling evidence that the answer is yes -- i.e., the migration's recurring savings exceed its upfront costs:

* The city no longer has to pay for license upgrades, thereby eliminating a major recurring cost forever -- savings of nearly 3 million pounds every three to four years, according to the article. That's huge.

* The city no longer has to upgrade desktop software or hardware as frequently, reducing another recurring cost forever -- also huge.

* Most surprisingly, the city claims its IT department is fielding considerably fewer user complaints with Linux than with Windows, reducing another major cost forever. Labor-intensive IT support is always the costliest component of operating a corporate desktop, so that's also huge.

If the recurring cost savings claimed by the city of Munich are accurate, every budget-strapped city in the planet should be seriously considering this kind of migration to desktop Linux. It makes a lot of sense purely from a financial standpoint.

[UPDATE: I toned down the language and corrected key figures, which were off by an order of magnitude due to an incorrect reading of the article. I also materially changed the bullet point regarding support costs, as the article itself was slightly misleading on the matter. THANK YOU Xylakant and luser001 for pointing out my errors!]

edwinnathaniel6• 14 years ago

It's good for them that they haven't caught the "SharePoint" (and soon, InfoPath) wave yet cause if they do, the migration cost will rise quite significantly.

Most offices these days do use SharePoint heavily and some of the BAs started their hands on InfoPath to make forms for data entry to SharePoint.

To make matter worse (or sweeter, depending your POV), these whole thing can be acquired cheaper by using Office 365 (their cloud version of Office) plus certain Office 365 offerings automatically gives you Office 2010 Professional Plus for free. Sweet deal if you ask me.

Some of us would like to see Linux to win the battle especially when it comes to cost perspective. Unfortunately, Microsoft took notes and they had adjusted their licensing cost as well.

For example: in the K-12 sector, I heard schools are getting 90% discounts. Ninety percent discounts.....

cs7022• 14 years ago

edwinnathaniel:

You're absolutely right about Microsoft Sharepoint (and InfoPath): it makes switching away from Windows much more painful and costly. FWIW, I have no doubt there are a lot of smart people at Microsoft thinking 24 hours a day about how to increase switching barriers for customers.

As to Microsoft's licensing discounts in key markets, they're not new. Ballmer traveled personally to meet with Munich's mayor and reportedly offered similarly crazy discounts to prevent them from switching to Linux. (See http://www.infoworld.com/t/platforms/microsofts-ballmer-figh... and http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.heise.de/... for some details.)

Regardless, the important question (for budget-strapped cities and governments) remains the same: can they save a lot of money by switching to desktop Linux? If the savings claimed by Munich are accurate, the answer is a resounding yes.

rbanffy10• 14 years ago

> It's good for them that they haven't caught the "SharePoint" (and soon, InfoPath) wave yet cause if they do, the migration cost will rise quite significantly.

You must not forget to factor in the huge pain of living with SharePoint. A good friend of mine, heavy Microsoft user (and advocate) regularly complains about downtime and data loss because of their SharePoint install. They were forced into it because Microsoft is one of their most important clients and demanded that they use it (or they'd move their business to a competitor)

efuquen• 14 years ago

"For example: in the K-12 sector, I heard schools are getting 90% discounts. Ninety percent discounts....."

That makes plenty of a sense. If you force people to use Microsoft products while they're young they are much less liable to switch to another platform while they're older. They're use to their tools and people are lazy. So heavily subsidizing educational uses of software makes plenty of sense.

God forbid we ever lived in a hacker culture where kids in K-12 were forced to learn how to code and actually understand how computers worked as part of the curriculum, then Microsoft would be in real trouble.

daniel_solano• 14 years ago

For example: in the K-12 sector, I heard schools are getting 90% discounts. Ninety percent discounts.....

If I recall correctly, according to the director of IT of a large, local non-profit, they get access to the full suite of enterprise Microsoft products for something on the range of $1000 per year.

At that price point, saying 'open source can save you money' is meaningless, because they have already made investments in Microsoft IT expertise.

drucken2• 14 years ago

"Most surprisingly, the city claims its IT department is fielding HALF as many (!) user complaints with Linux than with Windows, reducing another major cost forever."

Uh, what? Complaints can change at any time and due even to "small" changes. Also, there could be changes in the opportunity cost of running Linux vs other operating systems in the future which could be realised/visible to ordinary users and thus cause a rise in complaints. But yes, for now, if the facts are right, they have saved themselves significant support cost.

Rest of your summary deductions are sound.

luser001• 14 years ago

Maybe I read the article wrong, but my spidey sense went off when reading the article. They're comparing the maximum_complaints_per_month quantity before and after switch. i.e., the peak value of complaints_per_month. Not average or annual.

I agree with your other points.

FTA:

    The maximum number of complaints was 70 per month
    before the beginning of the switch to LiMux. After the
    number of LiMux workplaces increased from 1,500 to
    9,500, the maximum number of complaints per month
    dropped to 46.

Xylakant12• 14 years ago

Actually, that's a misinterpretation in the article. The original document mentions those figures, but in a different context: Those are the total number of complaints for limux workplaces in the beginning and in the end and it includes all kinds of errors - application errors, user errors, database and network connectivity so it's nothing but a rough upper bound. It's given as rough indicator that most problems have been solved.

Xylakant12• 14 years ago

While I support the general notion of your statement, I have to correct some facts:

- The recurring costs for licence upgrades are said to be 2.8 Mio Euros every 3 - 4 years. However, there are other cost factors that need to be taken into account: migration and training costs for the new windows and office versions and cost that are now saved since they took the opportunity to unify some of their document management. That's not 10 mio pounds per year, but still a sizable amount.

- In the original document, no amount is given for the cost savings for the hardware that's not replaced.

- There are no statistics given for the number of support queries in terms of linux vs. windows. There is anecdotical evidence but they response explicitly states that full and valid statistics will only be available in two years. The number cited is the total number of support queries for the linux workstations over time. It is cited as proof that the pain points from the beginning of the migrations have been resolved and that the number of support queries is dropping sharply even though the number of linux workstations is rising. The number is also said to include all kinds of errors, including network, server and database errors.

Still, the cost savings are totalled at somewhere around 3.8 Mio Euro for the whole period and since most of the up-front investments have been done now the number can be expected to rise. It's not as huge as you make it sound, but it's still big. And most importantly its a proof that this can be done without disrupting everything.

(most numbers taken from the original statement at http://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/dms/Home/Stadtinfos/Presse-Se...)

edwinnathaniel6• 14 years ago

Don't forget to add the man-hours related to the licenses:

1) Navigate the licenses

2) Talk to the 3rd-party re-sellers (their response time varies)

3) Approval to purchase

These are "hiccups" that will slow down all projects were you had to go through them (and it is uncommon situation in Microsoft shops).

desireco42• 14 years ago

Replacing MS Office with Libre Office, especially based on comments so far seem to be not that great choice. People not calling support, it might be tu number of reasons. I bet if they did survey on what people think about impact on their work, they would get different results. I was thinking and Google Docs would probably be better choice as alternative to MS, however, this is just another provider ie. you don't get open source.

I am all for open source, and cities like Munich getting into it is welcome news, and will influence improvement in apps, however I suspect there is a lot of negativity pushed under the rug here.

kishorgurtu• 14 years ago

Linux? Seriously. A PDP-11 with ed is more than enough. Linux is overkill.

darklajid• 14 years ago

Maybe interesting as well: Dave Richards is aggregated on planet.gnome.org with his work blog [1] about running the infrastructure of the city of Largo, Florida [2] (granted, far from the size of Munich). Time frame seems similar (since 2006) and his blog contains quite a bit of technical information about the challenges of running a city wide thin client network and the custom software they create for their users.

Its a fun read to learn about how many instances of Firefox you can run on a single machine at any given time as well..

1: http://davelargo.blogspot.com/

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largo,_Florida

gitarr• 14 years ago

It seems to me that some Microsoft (and maybe Apple) marketing people are hard at work at every discussion about this topic, even here.

tzs• 14 years ago

Have they actually saved anything when you take into account nearly a decade (so far) spent on doing this migration?

The Munich migration is pretty much the canonical example of how to botch a Linux migration.

jwildeboer• 14 years ago

Yes. And 6 years (2006 the migration started) is far from "nearly a decade" if I can trust my math. The Munich migration has been attacked, downplayed, doomed for as long as it is running. The article here gives some hard data based on a reply to a request from the opposing political party in Munich that hoped to get some ammo to attack the migration. Instead they got well researched data that shows the opposite - so far they are absolutely in budget, saved 30-60% of costs (as planned), reduced support costs (as hoped) and created a side project called WollMux that tremendously helps in migrating the VB cruft and macro ridden templates that accumulated over the past 10-15 years into a reusable library of centralized functions.

They "deduplicated" a lot of redundant forms (one little example: The act of asking for PTO was implemented in 45(!) different forms depending where you work in Munich - now it is one single unified service for all) and by centralising stuff they can now do useful statistics that simply didn't exist before.

The focus on Open Standards starts saving a lot of time and money in the archives already.

(Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, have been involved privately in the migration a bit since 2005)

Xylakant12• 14 years ago

The original document has the hard facts: Until 2011 they spent 11.7 Mio Euros on the migration and another 2.08 Mio Euros on workflow optimizations that they tackled at the same time. The calculated cost for a migration of the Windows NT environment to a newer windows version including support and the same workflow optimizations are at 15.52 Mio euros. That's a saving of 1.74 Mio Euros or roughly 11.2%. This is taking into account that most migration costs now have been paid, and savings will subsequently will rise. They also have anecdotical evidence that error rates and ongoing support costs have dropped. It's certainly anything but a canonical example for a botched project.

DrStalker3• 14 years ago

That's a saving of 11.2% comparing an actual cost to an estimated cost; if the estimated cost blew out (which seems to happen a lot in migrations) then the savings could be even bigger.

azth• 14 years ago

They should have called it Munix :P

"Linux switch saved city millions and reduced user complaints"

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