Thimbles & Care

I’ve talked a little in the last few posts about switching to a commercial ERP or continuing to build our own. There is a third alternative that sits somewhere between these two: switching to and participating in open source projects like Kuali or Sakai. This could relieve us of some of the costs of software development and help ensure we don’t deviate from industry-standard practices, while avoiding some of the problems of vendor lock-in and allowing us to maintain a committed developer community.

Again, the costs of migrating to this would be high (although I expect they might be smaller than some of the other alternatives.) If I were the one making the decisions about the University’s strategic direction, I would give it a lot of consideration.

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Update: I took a walk at lunch and decided I should explain what I meant by “maintaining a committed developer community.” One of the dangers of switching to a commercial ERP is that it is likely to be a one-way transition. (I’m indebted to Adam Connor for this insight.) People who enjoy application development and are good at it are almost certain to leave during a migration to a commercial ERP, and if you later decide it’s not working out you will most likely have a staff without the skills needed for in-house development. Since part of the “price” of participation in an open source project is contributing code back, this shouldn’t be as big an issue.