"So what?" you might say. After all, the same people who create such nice, incredibly expensive, and incredibly popular software should be able to make internal tools that work well. Seems logical, but that does not reflect reality. After all, an internal tool is "overhead" so the large teams of people and careful QA testing are not available. Instead, you get this mess of home-brewed parts that no one really understands and can't update well. Our IT ticketing system runs this way, unfortunately, and has been offline 5 or six times in July and August. Since it is only maintained at the HQ, we have to wait for their business hours to get it fixed. And, if the one or two people that understand the system is on vacation....
From my current standpoint, the build vs. buy call goes like this:
- Payroll and Accounting Systems: Buy. Too many really good solutions available and making your own offers no advantage
- HR systems: Buy. You'll have to do a lot of customization with a large company but start with a real package
- Document Management: Buy.
- CRM/ERM: 1/2 and 1/2. there is so much customization that you're really doing both
- IT Management: Buy. Save yourself some pain and suffering
I think you should only build systems that actually give you competitive advantage. If you know that a SQL driven, distributed CRM system with offline synchronization will give you an advantage, then build one. If your 99.999% uptime is your main sales point, build a custom monitoring solution. Otherwise, buy it - you are buying someone else's QA, testing, and customer feedback experience instead of slogging through all the details yourself.
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