Build vs. Buy...Part Deux

Often, decisions around how to solve a given business problem are simplistically boiled down to “Build versus Buy.” What is often lost in the shuffle is the fact that a business truly can get the best of both worlds in this regard, especially when using enabling software suites.

Larger and more complex organizations are often driven to the “build” decision because no packaged software exactly meets their needs. This can be an appropriate position to take, and even more so when the organization is dealing with rapidly changing business drivers, offering diverse business services, and needing to bring on large numbers of external customers which is often far too expensive from a licensing standpoint with most packaged software. However, when a considerable amount of the functionality needed can be provided by and/or exposed through a foundational enabling technology, businesses need to consider seriously the value of building that aspect of their technology infrastructure as opposed to looking at a packaged, supported, and actively updated solution. The question the organization needs to ask itself really boils down to “Do we want to be a software development company?”

In effect, when a business organization is presented with a solution from their technology team which appears to be a proposal to build an entire infrastructure and not a proposal to start solving their business needs immediately, they need to be concerned about the total time to solution and the hidden costs associated with the foundation-building efforts. Or even worse, they need to question if the foundation might be missed, yet again, and if they will therefore simply receive project by project solutions that leave them in the exact same position in which they started.