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Published on August 28, 2007

Pisit Inkasuwan, director of the IT planning division at Egat, said the state enterprise had a policy to adopt open-source software in the organisation to reduce the cost of ICT management and ICT systems.

He said Egat last year adopted a policy to use Open Office software to run spreadsheets. There are 7,000 PC units based on Open Office or 70 per cent of all 12,000 PC units in the organisation. The state enterprise started to use open-source for servers 10 years ago.

"We have to apply IT governance that reduces the cost of our IT investment and use Open Office and open-source software to support office use and automation such as application forms and car reservations," said Pisit.

Egat aims for strong IT governance, to reduce the cost of IT investments and encourage IT developers to support the organisation by using open-source software and Open Office.

An executive source at Egat said the organisation has a target in the next five years to have 10 per cent of all servers in the organisation and 10,000 desktop PCs using Open Office.

Egat has also developed an intranet search engine based on open-source software at Hawai.co.th and develops electronic learning based on open-source software for officials in and outside the organisation.

To support open source in the organisation, Egat has set up a help desk to train officials in the organisation so they have the competence to use open-source software in their work and access information via the intranet and search engines using open-source applications.

"Open source is an alternative for Egat to reduce the cost of investment and encourage officials to use open source in the organisation. We plan to develop electronic document management based on open-source software next year," said Pisit.

Jirapan Boonnoon

 The Nation