How many digital technology mistakes can you afford? How to learn and adapt at a faster pace and not always at your expense.

6 February 2025 • by Catalyst

Are you responsible for a Learning Management System or broader IT infrastructure in your organisation? Some of the challenges you may be experiencing include:

  • Trying to innovate while maintaining stability of your systems
  • Keeping up with rapid technological changes and trends to remain competitive
  • Working within budget constraints
  • Managing change
  • Enhancing cybersecurity
  • Being under-resourced

What else would you add to the list?

One other thing we’d add to the list is something we would sum up as ‘costly mistakes’. Some examples of such mistakes would be:

  • being locked into supplier contracts – a software solution that didn’t really work to solve your problem (or perhaps it created more problems?); or
  • a trial and error exercise that cost you a lot but in the end you found there’s a better solution, that proved effective for organisations with similar needs. You wish you could change your mind now but your budget is spent.

How many technological mistakes can you afford? And how do you minimise your ‘trial-and-error’ spend?

Collaborate and learn from others.

In addition to selecting the right technical support partner to receive up to date advice from, being a part of community – interacting with organisations with similar challenges – and sharing lessons learned is how you can achieve efficiencies. If you collaborate and learn from others, you will progress faster to innovative solutions and your strategic goals. This is where you cannot underestimate the benefits of Open Source (OS) Software.

By implementing OS in at least some parts of your business, you can achieve great efficiencies and enjoy the following:

The great community support that OS software offers provides transparency, faster paced innovation and healthy eco-system growth for all organisations who are a part of the community.

At Catalyst IT Australia we work with over 160 clients who invest in product improvements, sharing their findings and innovations with others. Check out the short video below where Moodle clients tell us why they love being a part of the OS (Moodle) community.

Great examples of community benefit delivered by our collaboration with our clients include:

1. SAML2 Single Sign-on Plugin which our client, La Trobe University invested in. Choosing to open source this plugin provided to be of great benefit as many others have stepped in to work with it and to enhance it along the way. This led to numerous bug fixes, performance improvements and new features, which otherwise would not have been implemented andall at a fraction of the cost.

2. SCORM Wrapper (mod_scormremote) plugin, developed in collaboration with our client, Early Childhood Australia which makes it easy to achieve efficiencies in course and user management . The plugin is available to the OS community and will benefit over time, from continuous improvements as more organisations use it in different ways.

There are plenty more examples where innovation and adapting to change, while maintaining efficiencies (working within budget constraints) has proven successful, thanks to the community behind the OS software development and maintenance.

If you are still unsure whether OS software is the right solution for your organisation, or where it fits within your digital technologies roadmap in the near future, speak with one of our Open Source consultants.

Catalyst IT aims to create collaboration opportunities for the OS (EdTech) community by hosting live and virtual events (webinars) on annual basis. Subscribe to our newsletter, check in with our website and follow us on LinkedIn to stay in the loop.

Speak with an Open Source consultant today
You may also like:

In Open Source software ‘free’ stands for freedom, not price.

Open source software – what is it?

Supercharge your business: why it pays to be open.

What’s holding us back from being ‘open’? Why OS and business resilience go hand in hand.

Third party systems integration: challenges and opportunities.