Outsource, Offshore, Offshelf – value in your IT department

Today I enjoyed a creative workshop with strategic leaders of our company. Almost all were collectively of a similar mind on one topic which had me soul searching for the remainder of the day.

Aside from confusion over terminology, the common theme was to not build things within our own IT department if we could buy the software from another source, saving money and getting it quicker.

During the meeting I felt duty bound to point out that off the shelf software was still written by actual people and then spent most of the flight home pondering the wisdom behind the notion of ‘any software, as long as it isn’t written by you guys’, or rather that was how it felt for me, to hear their opinions on the topic.

Perhaps it’s difficult for us in our IT department to consider buying software and integrating it into what we already have because we know too much about how this could go. Given our recent experience of a user base that wants highly customised software we are sceptical of their ability to take the software ‘out of the box’ and bend processes to fit the application. In fact projects have been commissioned in the past on the basis of giving our systems ‘the wow factor’.

Off the shelf software has it’s place in the world, I believe the way to get the most value ‘out of the box’, is to keep it like that – vanilla, un-customised, as the maker intended it to be. Once you start messing around with it, you are locked in, to that provider, to the version you created, and to the cost of supporting the changes. This total cost of ownership also includes the upfront investment in the selection process for the software, which can be expensive if exhaustive.

As a department and as an organisation we will henceforth hold everything up for scrutiny against pre-built software solutions, with a collectively open mind. The goal being to achieve a balance between the money that can be saved in off the shelf and the additional total cost of ownership incurred by buying software in.

It’s a challenge as undoubtedly our comfort zone is to build on the current solution we know and love. Equally our value as an IT department is the business operations and processes that we know in such intricate detail. I’m hopeful the outcome will be ‘any software solution, as long as you guys are along for the ride'.