[Koha-devel] ILS Perceptions survey (Marshall Breeding)

Fri Nov 18 22:27:49 CET 2011

It seems to me that the tiered support model for software products in  
far from a new thing.  The manufacturer puts a product into the  
marketplace through a distribution chain.  At each stop on the chain,  
Manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer, in-house support group, and end  
user there are some levels of support provided.

The thing I keep seeing folks get confused about is the way the  
transaction happens in the open source community.  Whether you "buy"  
Oracle or PostgreSQL as your database, there are plenty of suppliers  
and support tiers for each one.  My price to consult on the admin for  
either one is the same.

I suspect that while it's true that at any given moment in time, a  
given ILS implementation has a primary support resource, the more  
choices that become availablewill yield higher turnover, more  
specialization and/ or better quality of service.

Let's hope for a bit of all three?
Stev3 Wills
Free Lance Nerd.

On Nov 18, 2011, at 4:09 PM, Ian Walls wrote:

> Marshall,
>
>
> It's not so much an 'edge-case' as a generalization.  Product and  
> Company are two separate things to track with an N to M  
> relationship.  Any given company can support multiple products (as  
> has been true for many years) and a product can be supported by  
> multiple companies (this tends to only be true of open source  
> products, but not necessarily; a company could have a license with  
> another to support their proprietary system).
>
> I'd be happy to help make the necessary structural changes to the  
> system to support this generalization; I know time is tight, and  
> it's probably more important to me right now than you.  But given  
> the trends in open source ILS systems (more people adopting, very  
> few leaving), this is only going to become more and more common as  
> time goes by.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> -Ian
>
> On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Marshall Breeding <marshall.breeding at librarytechnology.org 
> > wrote:
> MJ,
>
> The survey needs to cover the automation scenarios in place in most
> libraries.  Within any given niche, there may be some quirks, but  
> almost all
> ILS implementations contract for support only from a single  
> organization.
> In rare cases, there may be additional contracts to other vendors for
> development tasks, but the question focuses on support. I don't want  
> to
> design the survey around edge cases that rarely occur.
>
> In this year's survey, I've added an additional factor for libraries  
> to
> indicate whether they receive support directly from their "ILS  
> vendor" or
> through an intermediary such as through another library or  
> consortium.  This
> gives me a way to analyze the results in a way that accommodates the
> situation in many consortia where the first-line support happens  
> locally
> with only unresolved issues being directed to the contracted support
> organization.
>
> Libraries responding to the survey can always provide additional  
> information
> in the comments field to explain any special circumstances, and  
> often they
> do.
>
> I publish summaries of the survey responses in a way that protects the
> confidentiality of the responders.  I do not plan to release the  
> data beyond
> that.  While it may be possible to scrub and normalize the data in a  
> way
> that it could be shared publicly, it would take more effort beyond  
> what I
> already put in to the survey.  You are the only one that I recall  
> that has
> asked for this in the five years that I have been running this survey.
>
> Best regards,
>
> -marshall
>
> Marshall Breeding
> Editor, Library Technology Guides
> http://www.librarytechnology.org
> marshall.breeding at librarytechnology.org
> http://twitter.com/mbreeding
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: MJ Ray [mailto:mjr at phonecoop.coop]
> Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 1:15 PM
> To: koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org
> Cc: marshall.breeding at librarytechnology.org
> Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] ILS Perceptions survey (Marshall Breeding)
>
> "Marshall Breeding" <marshall.breeding at librarytechnology.org>
> > I do hope that all libraries using Koha will respond to the survey.
> > The survey forms are linked to each library's entry in the
> > lib-web-cats directory, so you will need to submit an entry if your
> > library is not already represented.  A large number of libraries  
> using
> > Koha are already represented, but I'm sure that there are many still
> missing. See:
>
> Hi Marshall.  Usual requests.  Please could you decouple the outdated
> one-to-one relationship between LMSes and support companies?
>
> And would you release (some subset of) the data as Open Access, Free  
> and
> Open Source Software in a nice ready-to-analyse format this year?
>
> It would be great to see an Open survey which reflected the reality  
> of the
> new LMS support landscape.  Maybe one of the above in 2011, one in  
> 2012?
>
> Thanks,
> --
> MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit  
> co-op.
> Webmaster, Debian Developer, Past Koha RM, statistician, former  
> lecturer.
> In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
> Available for hire for various work through http://www.software.coop/
>
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>
>
>
> -- 
> Ian Walls
> Lead Development Specialist
> ByWater Solutions
> Phone # (888) 900-8944
> http://bywatersolutions.com
> ian.walls at bywatersolutions.com
> Twitter: @sekjal
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