A study on the introduction of Open Source Software in the Public Administration

This paper reports about a study on the introduction of Open Source Software (OSS) in a Public Administration located in Europe. In the specific, we introduced the office automation software OpenOffice.org. The Public Administration examined introduced OSS as a means to save on the license costs and to have a larger space for customisation purposes. The adoption of the new software can have an impact on the employees’ productivity that need to be evaluated during the migration process. In this article, we compare the usage of OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office. Data about the usual office activities performed by the users participating to the experimentation have been collected by means of an automated non-invasive data collection tool. The result of this study reports a similar usage pattern of both suites in terms of workload, but a different approach in using functionalities provided by each software. A further analysis on the life cycles of documents elaborated with the office suites seem to validate the similarities among the software solutions examined.