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Comment by ares623

5 hours ago

Do migrations like this get easier each time? With prior art being available, and an ecosystem and pipeline starts to form around the new norm.

7 comments

ares623

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LaurensBER  4 hours ago

The biggest challenge with these kind of migrations is training users, especially government employees. Switzerland is relatively highly educated so this might be less of a challenge than in other countries but it won't be easy.

The technical part is probably relatively easy in comparison. Especially because the stakes are low (parallel run with the existing system, good will from everyone involved).

  • marcyb5st  4 hours ago

    Educated or not, people that have been using the same system for many years will have a tough time IMHO. Looking at my mom and dad interactions with any UI, it seems to me they don't really read what that menu is about, they just use "muscle memory" to navigate it. So I expect a drop in efficiency until that memory is rebuilt.

  • ur-whale  4 hours ago

    > Switzerland is relatively highly educated so this might be less of a challenge than in other countries but it won't be easy.

    True, but that's not accounting for a bunch of typically Swiss cultural factors:

    - Swiss people tend to love to death the "one standard solution for one particular problem" approach

    - Swiss people tend to be quite change-averse relative to other nearby cultures.

    Don't get me wrong I love the Swiss to death, and the above cultural biases actually have their advantages, but re-training government employees is not going to be easy, however well educated they may be.

    Fortunately, there is another cultural Swiss bias that's going to help: most large Swiss organizations have been designed using the army as a model, which mean Swiss employees tend to obey orders quite well.

    So if the mandate comes from the top, it'll likely succeed. Eventually. Cause in Switzerland, they tend to take their time (yeah, that's another base cultural cliché, but I couldn't resist. And we're already deep into those already, why stop :-) ).

com  4 hours ago

With a couple of exceptions, my guess is that these migrations are part of the commercial negotiation pack of government procurement agencies.

At a certain point I’d expect that tech sovereignty concerns will tip while governments out of the US-vendor mindset.

izacus  3 hours ago

Not really - this is akin to doing a complete rewrite of your 30 year old codebase to Rust.

Every organization has their own hacks, bespoke tools, processes and hardware that has to be painstakingly replaced, reprogrammed and users retrained. In many cases, Linux alternatives don't exist so they either have to be written or processes/hardware replaced.

These are OLD organizations and none of them is really the same as any other. Legendarily, companies like SAP made their whole fortunes managing this kind of complexity.

It's just a lot of work with a lot of edge cases you've never thought of (or seen in your life) that takes years.