Hello,

I would like to seek help in adding knowledge to my case study in preparation for a job interview I am about to have:

I am writing a case study about a certain company that is considering migrating from an old processing system to a new state of the art custom developed solution. They ask us to help understand the approach of the project. They understand that there are multiple vendors/applications within the market that can potentially help them, but they are unsure if the best approach is to go with one of these systems or with a homegrown tool.

Now.. what I thought that I should do is discuss to them the pros and cons of using homegrown tool and approaching multiple vendors.

For the homegrown tool

Advantages:
Flexibility of retaining key architecture design

Cheaper cost and utilizing own resources

Ability to use open source applications

The company owns the knowledge of the system on every phase

Disadvantages:

Maintenance

Resource concentrating on support will be a problem



For using vendors

Advantages:

There will be dedicated support for the application 24/7




-- basically I am struggling with the part of the advantages and disadvantages of using multiple vendors, as based on my experienced, our office always utilizes homegrown tools whenever we try to migrate our systems. But I am hoping that someone in the industry can help me determine the advantages of seeking help from consultants and using vendors for applications for the case study.


Any help or guidance is greatly appreciated.


Thank you

The best answers will hinge on whether the customer company's applications and requirements are totally unique, or they could use applications that are prevalent across their industry. Time to talk to the vendors, and have key in-house customer-users make some field trips to sites where candidate Vendor packages are already in use. Also, need to evaluate capabilities and abilities of in-house programming staff - have the apps they've built before stood the 'test of time' - and do the have the skills and experience to use the 'open source' approach ? It's also good to evaluate the stability of the vendors - how 'deep' and stable is their programming and support staff ? Could they be bought out by another company, and the staff that supports your app depart ?

Fred Wagner

  

>>>
For the homegrown tool
...
Cheaper cost and utilizing own resources
<<<

... is not necessarily a supportable assertion.

IF 'open source' can be leveraged for a MAJOR portion of the development, and IF appropriate skill is used in adapting it, and especially IF the project is managed with strong discipline to generate a good working specification and especially especially to avoid feature creep after freezing the spec, then, it could happen.  

At least, I think it could happen.  More likely, major efforts will be expended to conceal the real costs, and the project will eventually be abandoned, or reluctantly accepted with performance vastly reduced from what was promised.

 

Mike is right.  It rarely is cheaper to build your own solution versus taking a product that someone has already written and configuring it for your environment.  It will depend quite a bit on the needs of the company and how well the third-party products can meet them without customization.  It will also depend upon how complex the solution is.

To put it another way...the third-party vendor is going to have a team of architects and developers who do nothing but work on the product, do bug fixes, and add features.  That development cost is spread across their entire customer base, not just you.  In order for you to make something comparable, you would need to employ teams of architects and developers, but you have no customers to spread the cost across.

In my experience it's usually only a good idea to build your own application if at least one of the following is true:

1.  None of the third-party solutions available meet your needs.
2.  The resulting solution would be relatively simple and specific to your environment.
3.  You are regulated in a manner that requires you to actually own/have access to the application source code (very common with government agencies).

AND

4.  You already have strong software development skills and practices in-house.

If an item from 1-3 applies but item 4 does not, then you can contract out the development of your software.  I work for a company that does custom software development (amongst many other things).  You can get most of the advantages of developing the software in-house, without having to worry about as many of the nitty-gritty details, and you can work out the terms that make the most sense for your company in the contract.  The potential upside here is that a company that specializes in custom software development like that will most likely have a staff with skills that are very current in the latest technologies, as well as project managers, user experience designers, etc.   

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