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5 March 2008

Vendor Driven Theory

by Philip Mueller

VENDOR-DRIVEN Theory: a vendor's conception or mental scheme of something to be done, or of the method of doing it;

As we are moving into network society, we need to be aware of the phenomenon of vendor-driven theorizing and able to critically reflect vendor-driven theories.

- When we talk about theory, it makes sense to distinguish between theories observing the world and theories shaping the world. Let us call the first, explanatory theories (e.g. Newtonian Physics) and the second constitutive theories ( Liberal Democracy). Of course, most theories are hybrids (think Marxism, Liberalism, or Confucianism), but we can distinguish when hybrid theories observe or shape.

- I use the term vendor-driven theories to talk about situations in which a supposedly neutral software application or management approach introduces a substantive theory into a process. Think of enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management in the business world in the 1990s as examples of how the software changed the theory of how business was done.

- ERP and CRM vendors, integrated solution providers, and consulting firms have recently discovered the public sector as the next market for existing software applications. ERP has been re-christened GRP, as in Government Resource Planning and CRM, CiRM, as in Citizen Relationship Management. Government officials and public administrators have been happy to take up the ideas pitched to them and are implementing.

- What is interesting is to ask of course, in how far the analogy between ERP and GRP and CRM and CiRM works and where it breaks down? We also have to ask in how far these vendor-driven theories carry transformative potential and if it corresponds with our ideas about how governance should be organized.

This posting is indebted to Alexander Schellong, Hasnain Bokhari, and Philipp Zimmermann. In discussions with them I developed an appreciation for the amazing/scary transformative power of vendor driven theorizing. I believe it is an important term to introduce into the debate, which I hereby do.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at March 5, 2008 12:30 AM

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