| Summary: | South Africa has shown an increased interest and awareness of Open Source
Software (OSS) in the past decade. One of the reasons for this was the support
from the Shuttleworth Foundation for Open Source initiatives. Migrating to
OSS is a difficult and time consuming activity that should not be underestimated
by the migration team. Careful planning and roll-out procedures should
be in place before one commence on this journey.
Process reference models are used in different fields to capture the generic process
flow of activities. For the OSS domain, no process reference models could be
found for migration purposes. Therefore, this study has as aim the suggestion
of an initial set of process reference models for an organisational OSS migration.
These process reference models were identified by capturing the process models
for a case study that entailed the migration of the CSIR software systems and
desktops from proprietary to OSS. From this set of process models, the migration
processes were identified and refined to a set of suggested process reference
models for organisational OSS migrations. This set of process reference models
are useful to determine the processes necessary for organisations considering
migrating to OSS.
The study is divided into four research questions, where the first focusses on use
and value of process reference models and the second on what is already known
about OSS migration processes. The third deals with key processes within an
organisational open source migration (OOSM) and the last with process reference
models for an OOSM.
For the first research question, the use and value of process reference models
and the usefulness of utilising process reference models is discussed as well
as using process models as a modelling tool to identify and capture processes.
For the second research question, a summary is provided of what we know about
OSS migration processes and a description about what the researcher and others
have learnt about OSS, OSS migrations, process reference models, the process
and its structure. For the third research question, the key processes within an
OOSM is discussed as well as all the processes that took place during the OSS
migration project from basic administrative processes to complex processes,
from the beginning of the project until its completion. Lastly, for the fourth
research question, process reference models that are essential for an OOSM and
possible generic migration process models bound to reoccur are identified by the
researcher and validated using a focus group discussion. === M.Tech. (Information Technology)
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