I recently wrote about how open source software policies evolve. Yesterday I read another model about how open source software usage evolves in a company. Bernard Golden's O'Reilly Open Source in the Enterprise Report contains five pages on how to create an open source action plan and his first step is to decide if your company is early in their adoption of open source (90%), mainstream (10%) or an advanced user (<1%).
Early adopters are people still using open source software under the radar. Early adopters should focus on figuring out what they are using, setting up a govenrance process and learning community skills.
Mainstream users - who typically consider both open source and proprietary software solutions for new software needs - should start thinking about how open source software could be widely deployed, thinking about the company usage as a whole not on a case by case basis.
Advanced users - those that are very comfortable with open source softare and have an "open source if at all possible" type strategy - should start contributing to open source software and consider starting industry specific open source software projects.
Where does your company fall? Have you transitioned through these stages?