Open Source and the Fear of Failure

Yesterday I took part in an interesting event organised by BT called "Accelerating Enterprise adoption of Open Source Software" (disclaimer: filthy lucre was involved.) One topic that elicited much comment was why the public sector has singularly failed to deploy open source. As well as political issues (Tony Blair was and presumably still is manifestly in awe of (Sir) Bill Gates), there's another important issue to do with a fear of failure.

Nobody in government wants to take a chance on something new, so they stick with the old suppliers and the old solutions. When those (almost inevitably) fail, this causes people to be even more cautious, and so the vicious circle continues.

That's clearly bad news for open source, but here's a particularly good articulation of why the fear of failure is bad for governments more generally:

When I’ve spoken with government people, they confess a phobia of failure. Yet without the opportunity to fail, government – like industry and media – cannot experiment and thus innovate. We must give government the license to fail. That is difficult, especially because it is the citizenry that must grant that permission. I think government must begin to recast its relationship by opening up pilot procts to input and discussion, to smart ideas and improvements. I’m not suggesting for a second that every decision be turned into a vote, that law become a wiki. Government still exercises its responsibility. But it needs to use the new mechanisms of the web to hear those ideas. I would look for examples to Dell’s Ideastorm, Starbucks’ My Starbucks Idea, and Best Buy’s Idea Exchange.

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