The Potato Made Me Do It

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The Potato Made Me Do It

11/14/2007

By Christopher D. Coppola

I'm currently reading a book called the The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. You might recognize The Omnivore's Dilemma as his most recent book. One very interesting aspect of The Botany of Desire is that Pollan frees the reader from preconceived notions about the importance of people in the co-evolutionary relationship between humans and plants. He frees us by providing a completely inverted perspective. He writes from the perspective of the plant. Pollan points out that, from the human gardener's perspective, she chose to plant the potato. From the potato's perspective, however, it induced her to spread its genes by playing on her desires for nutrition, taste, and other important selection criteria. In other words, the potato was the principal actor: The potato made her do it.

The enterprise software ecosystem in education is an interesting place to view through a similarly inverted lens. Typically, of course, we see extraordinary spending, implementation overruns, and rising license and maintenance costs of enterprise software -- and we blame the vendor for these characteristics. This view assumes the vendor is the subject, and that it chose to select those characteristics. (The vendor chose to acquire its competitors and reduce choice; the vendor chose to spend more money on sales and marketing than on the software it's selling.) We draw these conclusions because we consider the vendor to be the principal actor.

Now let's invert the lens. Let's look at the institution's role as buyer and see how the buyer's actions shape the "choices" made by vendors. Take the reliance on complex RFPs as an example. Looking through an inverted lens, we might see that lengthy, complex RFPs automatically select some of the characteristics found in proprietary software organizations -- large sales staffs and response teams. We might also see that buyers' expectations of vendors at the industry's conferences select characteristics such as extravagant receptions and other events that increase marketing spending and add to the sales price of software and services. In addition, we might perceive that the general tendency of relying heavily on the software company throughout the evaluation cycle further rewards heavy spending in sales and marketing. The characteristics that are rewarded are selected, and so evolution does its job and creates the software organization with the most rewarded -- but not necessarily the most desirable -- characteristics.

These days, there's an interesting ecological shift underway that's changing both the available choices and the selected characteristics. Leading institutions, together with a new breed of software company, are developing open source software in communities like