Critical Success Factors for Adoption of Open Source

Open Source Software (OSS) adoption is a growing public health and industry trend. In order to take advantage of this movement, the CDC released an open source policy that defines how open source software, projects and software can be used within the agency. This presentation will cover the critical success factors for open source software adoption by the CDC and its partners. These critical success factors are: project governance and change control, community composition, licensing structure and development methodology. OSS provides specific benefits to programs such as: increased synergies to reduce development time, lowered costs, increased feature functionality and increased ability to modify and configure software. This presentation will cover what these benefits mean to organizations and how existing systems can use open source software as part of an organization. Under OSS, project governance and change control is different from traditional projects as it must work with many stakeholders who directly participate in the construction of public health software. Without the right policies and procedures in place, OSS risks the failure of not meeting critical legislative requirements. Communities are extremely important to OSS as they are both the developers of software as well as the users of software. All members of the community work toward improving the end product by either contributing direct changes to the software or by contributing feedback on software functionality. Finally, an open and collaborative development methodology is used in OSS to allow for high quality, secure functionality. This methodology differs from traditional methods in that it must compensate for the diverse composition of the project community. This methodology addresses changes, security, testing and acceptance of project software. The lessons learned from the CDC open source policy are applicable to PHIN partners seeking to understand and realize the benefits of OSS within their organization.