Thursday, September 25, 2008

K12 : large scale deployement of Open Source

I'm a happy participant of the large scale deployment session at the K12 Open Source conference. This session is dedicated to create a "white book" to help organisation to deploy large scale projects.

First things first :
* What is large scale deployement ?
Numbers are not enough : for small organization a 10 computer deployment can be large scale. So it really depends on where you start from !
However some very interesting ideas came out :
* It has to have a strong impact on every user targeted by the new system or by the upgrade

Some characteristics now :
* Need at least a pilot project
* Take at least one year to completely deploy the project
* Need specific change management in order to assist users

What is a successfull project :
* 100% of the users are using the system (it can takes some times)
* The project empowers the users
* The project is repeatable, scalable, affordable and sustainable
* The project has a strong and positive impact on how things are done after the project has been rolled out

It has been a very interesting day and some very interesting discussions occurs.

More to come...