Open source: The new usability testing
Furthering my recent focus on de-risking IT investments for the chief information officer, a thought occurred to me while reading CMS Watch's analysis of portal usability testing: open source offers the most comprehensive way to ensure software actually works before you pay for it, and to tweak it to make it work how you want it to work.
This should be an obvious benefit to any CIO used to listening to endless rounds of demos from a vendor's sales engineers...only to discover that the difference between a PowerPoint and implementation is often stark, painful, and costly.
Enter open source.
It's not that open-source software is necessarily better in its features. Often it's not. But an open-source software package with equal or even slightly deficient functionality, when compared to a proprietary offering, is still a safer and likely better bet than the proprietary offering. Don't believe me? You don't have to. With open source, you can try before you buy.
One key problem with the traditional enterprise software sales process is that it depends on faith, faith driven by inflated expectations born of demo-ware (and vendor-sponsored "research"). For this and other reasons, up to 62 percent of IT projects fail. Open source offers enterprises a comprehensive way to do a dry run (or many dry runs) on a technology decision, and thereby reduce risk.
Such a trial process is not free, as enterprise IT will need to pay with its time. But it's much better than buying on a promise only to discover that what you got was...a promise.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
The best way to proceed is to build your RFI (request for information) in which a detailed as possible list of requirements is defined. Then you subject your vendors to respond, and from the short list of three vendors you ask for a demonstratiion.
Open source may be the winner, or even a closed source application could be. The implementaton of the winning software will pay for itself, in a short matter of time