Buy vs. Build — the eternal dilemma
If it’s Friday, it must be another Baseline column. This one talks about the issues surrounding whether to build or buy software:
The other day, an IT colleague of mine mentioned a conflict at a corporation where he’s working. The corporation has a mission-critical application deployed across a large number of workstations. The set of corporate employees who use this application largely use it and nothing else all day long at dedicated workstations. The application they are using is a customized third-party application; however, the firm has been having chronic problems with this app (let’s call it “QRSApp”), and so is looking at different solutions. The firm could continue to make changes to QRSApp to fix their problems. The firm could switch to a different third-party application; several other vendors market applications of this type within this firm’s industry. Or, as a senior IT manager now wants to do, the firm could develop a completely custom and private application to replace QRSApp, so that the firm has complete control over it.
The question: which solution is best?
Comments welcome here or there. ..bruce..
About the Author: bfwebster
Webster is Principal and Founder at at Bruce F. Webster & Associates, as well as an Adjunct Professor for the BYU Computer Science Department. He works with organizations to help them with troubled or failed information technology (IT) projects. He has also worked in several dozen legal cases as a consultant and as a testifying expert, both in the United States and Japan. He can be reached at 303.502.4141 or at bwebster@bfwa.com. 
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