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Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

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Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think governments should have a full integration team full time for potential software deployments of bought on the shelf solution? That doesn’t make much sense. Governments don’t have that much software integration to do. Especially when you consider that these projects generally require specific knowledge of what’s integrated. What will these people do the rest of the time? Are you suggesting hiring specialists…

> Governments don’t have that much software integration to do ...What? Most European governments rely on herds and herds of pachidermic, segregated software systems and databases. There's surely enough to keep a whole team busy for years, if not decades. And I'd be surprised if the final costs would be higher than hiring consultants again and again.

You are mistaking technical issues and organisational issues.

Projects are driven by business requirements and values not a desire to share more or rationalise. Segregation is more often a matter of governance and processes.

That's not things you will solve using a bunch of developers. This discussion makes me realise that most of the people commenting on HN probably work for software companies and have very little experience of how big projects, be them IT or organisational, are conducted in traditional companies and what are the challenges they face.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Governments don’t have that much software integration to do ...What? Most European governments rely on herds and herds of pachidermic, segregated software systems and databases. There's surely enough to keep a whole team busy for years, if not decades. And I'd be surprised if the final costs would be higher than hiring consultants again and again.

You are mistaking technical issues and organisational issues. Projects are driven by business requirements and values not a desire to share more or rationalise. Segregation is more often a matter of governance and processes. That's not things you will solve using a bunch of developers. This discussion makes me realise that most of the people commenting on HN probably work for software companies and have very little e…

Well of course going towards integration vs segregation is an organizational (in this case, political) decision. I was saying that the average EU state machinery has a lot of room for integration, should there be a political intention to go that way.

Case in point: in Italy, different towns used to have different systems for their resident registrations. I doubt there was an extreme need for customization in this context, it was just that bigger/wealthier towns had a chance to digitize earlier and so on, leading to extreme fragmentation. Moving to a nationwide register took literally a dozen years or so, for a single service of a single country.

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