The Welsh Assembly Government IT facilities seem to be about three years behind everyone else. Well no-one expects them to be ‘cutting edge’ but 3-4 years behind? What on earth have they been doing? Is it a cunning plan to prevent data loss or data mishandling in that they don’t have the IT facilities to lose handle the data adequately in the first place?
The Welsh governing body is three-quarters of the way through an upgrade to Windows XP that will be completed in 2009, according to CIO Dr Michael Harrington.
The authority began upgrading from the Windows NT4 operating system in 2004 and Harrington said the authority, which employs 6,000 staff, did not feel ready to make the leap to Vista.
Source; Silicon.com
And why to Microsoft products when it would be cheaper and better to consider newer Open Source solutions?
If you’ve ever been in an office situation where the network goes down, or the printers refuse to print, and you have to call in I.T… well, imagine that, but when the I.T person turns up they haven’t got a clue either, and so have to phone some 3rd party Linux people. That’s the main reason. It would mean organisations retraining all the I.T staff (or hiring new ones), not to mention retraining all their users (“where is Outlook?”). Not only that, but all that custom software they use (asp/.net/etc) would have to be re-written for Linux. Ouch.
Of course, if other governments and organisations can move to oss, no reason ours can’t: it would save millions, long-term. But in the short-term, it’s a case stick with what you know.
Still quite shocking that only 3/4 of their machines are running XP. You’d think security issues alone would force upgrades. Obviously not.
And wait… they started upgrading in 2004, and it won’t be finished until 2009? 5 years to upgrade their machines??
Dr Phil Williams, towards the end of the time he was an AM, managed to become chairman of an Assembly committee – if I remember correctly – dealing with the the big computer change-over that the Assembly was then about to undergo. Phil was a strong enthusiast for material such as Linux and I remember him pushing the point hard in committee meetings. The look on officials’ faces had to be seen to be believed.
I cannot remember in detail any counter-points that were made (discussions never reached that stage, perhaps). My own view as a journalist in the Assembly is that it is crucial that computer systems are simple to operate. And the simplicity has to be obvious when something goes wrong (due to wrongly-placed fingers on a keyboard, in particular !).
In an office, the first person asked for help is your neighbour, etc. Only then do you ring the computer department; then, there’s the question of how quickly an engineer can be sent; and that answer depends on how much else is going wrong at that time.
Linux etc might be excellent for geeks. But how good for the rest of us ?
The Assembly system is also extensively used by AMs, often from laptops at remote sites – some of them are as thick as sxxt; others are quite intelligent, but not computer-minded…