Tim Almond

Much of the talk in terms of raising usage of OpenOffice.org deployment are around getting government to use OpenOffice.org more. This effort is good, but I wonder whether groups like small businesses may be a better fit.

There are a number of problems with the government over small business.

1. Procedure/legislation based product selection. Government have to provide justification of their decisions in terms of buying products, which can be subject to appeals by suppliers. They can, in effect help to block the decision. This doesn’t happen with a small businessman. It’s his business, his money, and his choice.
2. Lack of Incentive. There used to be an expression "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM". What this really says is that in product selection, it’s not a risk/reward payoff. If you work in a large bureaucracy, you generally don’t get rewarded for saving the company much money, but you might get into trouble for going with a low-risk, money-saving solution that goes wrong. This makes people in large organisations more conservative. A small business, where the owner is close to the decision makers will gladly save even hundreds of pounds, as he sees it directly. Look at who the first people were buying PCs from direct companies. They weren’t blue chips, they were small businesses.
3. Potential for corruption affecting choices. It’s hard to bribe someone who runs their own business. Someone who works in a large bureaucracy would often rather fly 1st class with a major airline than a cheap carrier. Whilst it costs the company more, in terms of impact on them, as an individual, the cost is small. If you’ve got 2,000 people in an organisation, and a 1st class flight costs an extra £1,000, then if part of the money at the end of the year is divided equally, the guy travelling first class sees a loss in his pocket of 50 pence. By contrast, he gets a more pleasant flight, and some nice perks like maybe a 2nd class ticket he can use for a family holiday. Someone who owns their own business isn’t paying 50 pence to get those perks, he’s paying £1000, which frequently means that such costs are not worth it.
4. Slow and bureaucratic. Governments rarely move quickly. The size of the organisations frequently require a huge amount of communication around the organisation before such decisions can be made. In a small business, there are less people and decisions can be made more quickly.

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Tags: Open Document //