Open Source Migration

Alexius International assisted the Ministry of Labor in Guatemala in integrating sustainable solutions to the institution’s information systems platforms. The Ministry of Labor, as with many organizations in developing countries, faced the difficult challenge of adopting a fully licensed information system platform that was within their financial reach and absorbable by their personnel.  Too often do development partners implement with the best of intentions costly proprietary software solutions with the understanding that the institution will be resonsible for future maitanance and upgrade costs, yet discounting the severe budgetary constrains many of these organizations operate under. 

The work Alexius did with the Ministry of Labor was the genesis project that would eventually lead to the Regional Labor Modernization Program.  Initially, the Ministry of Labor requested 30 computers from USAID that they could use to enhance their existing computing platform.  Alexius then performed a needs assessment for the Ministry to analyze the current environment and determine the best approach for modernizing the information management within the organization.  The assessment determined that the lack of uniformity among the computers, extensive use of pirated software, and the pervasiveness of viruses, suggested that what would be most effective for the Ministry would be to rebuild their ICT platform from scratch.

Open Source software provided an obvious mode with which to address financial constrictions, although implementation of Open Source software does require personnel retraining .   Alexius recommended implementing an Open Source platform to keep within financial limitations, and addressed the issue of usability by explicitly including extensive training as part of the deployment.  By doing this, all of the core infrastructure (government portal, security, email, internet, user authentication, calenders, file sharing, etc.) was standardized across the institution.

As a result, the Ministry of Labor maintains a sustainable cost structure, a successful knowledge transfer and a software platform that is fully licensed. The Ministry of Labor is among the first agencies in the Guatemalan government to follow licensing compliance laws and the project was the first of its kind in country.  To date, the Ministry of Labor receives about 1.5 million hits per month on its E-government portal, the second most visited government site in Guatemala.