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Enterprise software as a luxury good
Friday, July 11 2008
Clay Shirky wants to know if there is social science literature that might shed light on why it is hard to sell open source software to large institutions. He wonders whether it’s broken price signalling mechanisms, or perhaps some problem in organisational behaviour.
The answer is of course that he is barking up the wrong tree. The correct literature to be reading is Thorstein Veblen; specifically, his work on conspicuous consumption.
Conspicuous consumption is manifested when people obtain luxury goods not for their use value but for the increase in status they accrue when the goods are displayed. The goods need not be ostentatious. They need only send signals to the owner’s peers. For example, in the UK a good bespoke suit is hardly distinguishable to the average punter from one bought from Marks and Spencers, and yet it sends a powerful message to the right people about the owner.
Enterprise software is purchased and deployed on exactly these principles. One of the first things that usually accompanies the announcement of a new system is a proud boast of the cost and labour involved. Of course sometimes this isn’t necessary – we know that if you bought Oracle, SAP or BEA you must have a great deal of money. This is also why the very top tier don’t go for Windows. Windows is the middle-class option. Really rich firms that are secure in their status either go top of the line (mainframe and expensive Unix) or free (like Wall St firms running Linux) because they have nothing to prove. Both the cheapest and the most expensive software cannot be bought in a shrinkwrapped box.
We should also note that in his Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen argues that the leisure class demonstrates status in that the goods defined as luxury manifestly waste the resources and labour of others. Clearly open-source software, powered essentially by the goodwill of donated labour, cannot assuage this need to demonstrate waste through the coercion of others’ labour, whereas the unwilling toil of cubicle drones, aggregated into an enterprise product, is the pyramid of our times.
There is actually fertile ground for future research in this area. Can the vendor lunch be seen as a form of potlatch? What is the relationship between printed documentation and software quality? Do taller CIOs, as they say, really have bigger budgets? We await the findings of scholars in the field with interest.
Tags: ha ha only serious ~ management
The most depressingly true thing I read today
Tuesday, October 30 2007
This post from Reginald Braithwaite sums up everything I always suspected was wrong with software project management. (It also has cautionary observations about startups that aren’t quite so universal).
…We have a really simple way of completing successful software projects: we put successful people on them. But we have a broken way of thinking about it: we don’t like to think of the people as being special, we think that what the people do is successful.
And by that logic, we can take anyone, have them do the same things as successful people, and our projects will succeed.
In a manager’s mind, the measure of whether information is good or not is, Does it measure whether people are doing the same things that successful people have done on projects I’ve been told were successful?
This is not the same thing as measuring whether the project is on its way to success at all. This measures the outward appearance of a project. Things that can be measured easily are rarely the most significant things. Behaviours that can be “gamed,” like how many hours a team is working, will be gamed.
And as above, even if a manger knows better, does her manager know better? If not, good information will be difficult to sell and she will be under a lot of pressure to serve Lemon Pie.
Off balance sheet transactions
There’s another important reason that projects have bad information: the best information is off balance sheet. That’s an expression meaning something a businessperson sweeps under the rug. Try Googling Off Balance Sheet Transaction. It’s never pretty.
In essence, project plans and reports never include the most important information about the likelihood of project success. Never. (I mean never in the same sense that Joel Spolsky means “nobody,” as in “fewer than 10,000,000 project plans”)…
Tags: software ~ management ~ linky
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