Comment Hire help (Score 1) 736
It doesn't seem feasible to have a FTE deal with support for a tool that is an integral part of the organization's environment. Not only is it a waste of the FTE's time, if that person were to leave the organization would have to find a replacement that was already up to speed with the tool.
A better solution would be to use consultants like you (and me.) When I bid on a project I include provisions to support the project for some length of time, this is particularly important when the project includes open source tools. Once the support period ends a client can still contact me for additional support, either on an hourly basis or by negotiating for support through a monthly contract. A decent consultant should be able to support many different organizations and open source tools; when I need to update Apache for my clients I don't download and build a copy at each client's site, I get one copy, build it and then distribute it to the clients. This way the time (and cost) per client is quite low, it's much more efficient than having an FTE monitor a list and install every patch themselves.
A consultant who's familiar with how open source works and is reasonably organized can learn about a new tool and very quickly be able to support that tool. Of-course if the organization requires a great deal of customization the cost can be quite high, but if all that's required is an occasional security patch and relatively minor configuaration change then a decent consultant should be able to do that for less than $8,000 a year.
--alex
A better solution would be to use consultants like you (and me.) When I bid on a project I include provisions to support the project for some length of time, this is particularly important when the project includes open source tools. Once the support period ends a client can still contact me for additional support, either on an hourly basis or by negotiating for support through a monthly contract. A decent consultant should be able to support many different organizations and open source tools; when I need to update Apache for my clients I don't download and build a copy at each client's site, I get one copy, build it and then distribute it to the clients. This way the time (and cost) per client is quite low, it's much more efficient than having an FTE monitor a list and install every patch themselves.
A consultant who's familiar with how open source works and is reasonably organized can learn about a new tool and very quickly be able to support that tool. Of-course if the organization requires a great deal of customization the cost can be quite high, but if all that's required is an occasional security patch and relatively minor configuaration change then a decent consultant should be able to do that for less than $8,000 a year.
--alex
