I found an old text book which I studied in 1990 in my first year of Accounting Information Systems and found a chapter on the pros and cons of Custom Solutions versus ‘off-the-shelf’ packages.

The advantages of Custom Solutions are unchanged and are obvious: No compromises : you get exactly what your organisation needs. It’s all about sculpting your software around your business as opposed to losing sleep over the constraints placed on your business by off-the-shelf solutions. I call off-the-shelf solutions, FIFO solutions. Not first-in-first-out, but Fit in or F*** Off!

The old text book cautions readers on Bespoke Solutions saying they are risky and costly. This has all changed dramatically over the last 15 years. Whether you throw Microsoft or Opensource tools at your custom software strategy, both the risks and costs have diminished to a point where I think its reckless for your organisation not to adopt a custom software strategy.

15 years ago, costs could be high: development skills and understanding was limited. Today you can find talent everywhere you look, on shore and off-shore. This translates into a reduction in cost. In 1990, if a bus hit your software developer, you were in difficulties…. now, with platform and coding standardisations anyone can pick up the code where it was last left off… this has decreased risk substantially.

There are only two caveats to the above… 1) Don’t reinvent the wheel 2) Make sure you spend as much money on defining your requirements as you do on developing the piece of software. I will talk a little bit more about these in future blog entries.

So if your organisation doesn’t have an online strategy why? : take the poll on the right hand sidebar – its anonymous so don’t think it’s a sales tool – I am just interested!

(Having said that - if you want some help defining your Custom Online Software Strategy - you know where to go - our website! )

Note: Originally posted at SmartApps

risk, smartapps, software