The Cathedral & Bazaar

In the 1990’s Eric Raymond used the term The Cathedral and the Bazaar as a metaphor for two ways of developing computer software. The cathedral is carefully planned and built by master craftsmen to last forever, or at least a very long time. A bazaar requires some planning but it changes in response to changing demands by vendors and their customers. Almost all corporate systems are much more like cathedrals than bazaars.

Web 1.0 evolved from cathedral systems and was designed to meet the needs of the owners: We want to communicate to you. Customer facing or Internet Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 (EW2) systems need to be more like bazaars in that they will change to meet unknown future needs and must serve both the owners and the users: We want to have a conversation with you.

The thought processes that lead to success are different. Cathedral like systems replace or extend something existing and can be defined, e.g., business processes. IT has spent years training line managers in the terms and steps of developing cathedral like systems: statement of work, requirements analysis, design, development, testing, training and implementation. Line managers tell business analysts what they want and then participated in testing to be sure they get it. Bazaars like systems, i.e., Enterprise 2.0, replace or extend the corporation’s communication with its customers. Communication exists today but is often difficult to define with any precision: a different set of players, a broader set of interests, sharing and collaboration, and at this point not well understood.

Cathedral systems replace or extend business processes. Understand the process and you know what the system must do. Relatively simple and you can learn from prior experience with similar systems. Enterprise 2.0 systems create a new, two-way communication medium. Understand the corporation’s present communication media including advertising, public relations, customer service, call centers, help desks, etc. and you can learn something about how the corporation views its relationship with its customers. But, it won’t tell you much about how customers view their relationships with the corporation or what they want and expect. And, there is no directly comparable experience you can draw on.

In his writing about The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond developed 19 lessons based on his personal experience and observations about open source system development – the bazaar. Five of them are directly applicable to Enterprise 2.0:

• The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
• Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
• Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
• Provided the development coordinator has a medium at least as good as the Internet [intranet EW2] and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
• Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.