Mike Fitzmaurice, VP of North America and Chief Evangelist at WEBCON.
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Software is a part of everything now. It’s no longer like it was just a few years ago when many departments (at most) used email, documents and spreadsheets. Sales departments now rely on CRM systems, marketing people use digital campaign management software and so on.
This isn’t a bad thing, by the way; applying software to a business function helps document it, simplifies the spread of best practices, and ensures continuity as people leave and join a different organization. It’s, in a very real sense, a company’s digital DNA.
But if an organization’s approach defaults to one of procuring or subscribing to commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software each time a need is identified, a time of reckoning is inevitable—it’s only a question of when.
Overreliance On COTS Can Be Problematic
Certain widely known high-value COTS offerings that address highly standardized use cases are great. But using COTS for everything is another matter. It brings to mind three problems:
1. Expenses
If you have different subscriptions for your ERP, CRM, campaigns, expense reports, email, project management, business diagramming, HR governance, vacation requests, travel management, building security and so on, then those individual “low monthly subscriptions” quickly add up to a very high aggregate cost.
Then there’s the total cost of ownership, which makes things more interesting. Unless all of these applications come from a single vendor with a commitment to cross-product consistency, you need to be ready to juggle different vendor agreements, licensing models, support resources, service level agreements and more. It’s not only costly but risky.
Moreover, a cacophony of user experiences often irritates and frustrates users. Expect service desk and training costs to scale up accordingly. Those costs matter, but so do the planned benefits that never come to pass due to lower-than-expected user adoption.
2. Integration Woes
Integrating data from disparate systems is hard, and integrating processes that span multiple systems is even harder. There are formatting concerns, data integrity concerns, connectivity concerns, political concerns if different groups control different assets and expertise concerns. Integration can’t be bought; it must be built (tools can be bought, but they aren’t magic).
Once enough disparate software solutions are in place, one’s integration costs alone become hefty at best. In some cases, the cost of integration might exceed the costs of custom development.
There’s also the effect on corporate culture because that lack of integration perpetuates a culture of siloed solutions—and siloed departments.
There are a few sets of offerings out there that have worked out many (but not all) integration details between each other, but they’re rare, and it won’t matter unless you’ve chosen those exact options. The sole exception to this has been authentication, where OAuth 2.0 really has made single sign-on possible in many cases—but again, not all of them.
3. Limitations
Many companies, and I’d venture to say most government agencies, have a mandate to use COTS software whenever possible. What few, if any, are willing to do is accept the design limitations of those same COTS products and adapt their processes to them.
Instead, they fund extensive customization efforts to effectively squeeze square pegs into round holes. Ironically, the licensing costs combined with the consulting fees required to modify some features and work around others often add up to even more than what a custom development effort would have cost.
Moreover, even if the COTS product was perfect when you adopted it, your needs will change. Goals change. Laws change. Competitors change. Applications must change, too, and if your vendor isn’t willing to adapt accordingly, you’re again chasing workarounds.
COTS Itself Is Not The Problem
When use cases are highly consistent, well understood and common to many (if not most) potential clients/customers, COTS is perfect. It’s ideal for email, editing documents, working with spreadsheets and presentations, etc. It’s also great in situations where there are regulations or industry standards every company is expected to follow (e.g., ERP and accounting).
In fact, almost any given organization is likely to rely on a small number of such COTS offerings. It’s the long tail of various use cases where a long list of COTS solutions might not be such a good idea.
But if you aren’t going to use COTS for everything, something has to take up the slack. ...
Custom Solutions—If They’re Done Right
When you build a lot of your own applications, you can factor integration and consistency issues directly into their design. If you can use a common delivery platform, additional solutions need not require additional licenses.
In fact, building bespoke business applications solves all of the above issues—but only if it doesn’t introduce new ones. That hinges on the choice of tools, platforms and techniques.
Traditional custom development involves lengthy development cycles preceded by lengthy analysis and negotiations and followed by lengthy testing, education and maintenance. When you factor in the typically high cost of making changes to such solutions, the appeal of using COTS for every single use case isn’t hard to understand.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Thinking of solution delivery less like an artist’s studio and more like an application factory is a good central concept to rally around. Most low-code tools help with application construction, and some even include ways to help with requirements gathering, envisioning, modeling and design. Some provide common, reusable facilities for handling security, auditing, documentation, deployment, change management, dependency analysis and more. They’re worth exploring.
Conclusion
If you can build most of what you need yourself without the pain that used to be part and parcel with custom solutions, why wouldn’t you? The usual reasons to avoid custom development are costs and chaos, but low-code solution platforms can do a very good job of addressing both of those. It’s certainly an option worthy of investigation.
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