What is "Build Vs. Buy"? This is the process that we go through as software architects, developers, technical managers to decide whether it makes sense to build the software in-house or purchase the software off the shelf and integrate it. Here are a few examples of some experiences I have had in this area:
- Central Florida Investments, Orlando FL (1992 to 1998)
Over the past 13 years build vs.buy recommendations have been one of the main activities that I have been involved with. The experience that I have originates with my experiences as a lead engineer and Oracle Database Administrator at Central Florida Investments in Orlando, FL. The environment was an Oracle Forms V3 data entry system to maintain customers and enter financial transactions. We evaluated many products to handle pieces of the business, but in the end because of our proprietary systems it was difficult to implement any "out of the box" solutions. These products included many report writing solutions, phone solutions and accounting packages.
The logical solution in today's world would have been an ERP system. At the time they were evaluated and found to not be flexible enough to handle the unique business situations. They were also too expensive for the size of the company. Later on, they did implement Oracle Financials successfully and it made a big impact on their business. They were able to move from 2 resorts to 20 resorts. I have seen this kind of investment pay off big time in many companies over the years. - Sunterra Resorts 1998-2000
The next major build/buy decision I was involved with was when I worked for Sunterra Resorts in Orlando, FL. The package we evaluated at this time was a comprehensive Resort Management System from RCI. This system was evaluated before I came on board, and we started to use it as a basis for a large development project called "Sword." My involvement was analyzing the Technical architecture and guessing how many hours it would take to customize the software for use by Sunterra Resorts.
Many build versus buy decisions were made as part of this situation because of the availability of modules from RCI as well as the availability at the time of off the shelf software that could solve pieces of the business problem. At the time I also headed a small group of software developers responsible for augmenting the system to make it scale.
In this case my evaluation was extensive as we realized that it would take quite a bit work to scale the system because of it's architecture. Many skilled Oracle developers were on our team including many who had worked for Oracle for a period of time. The package was purchased, but as far as I know was never actually deployed to the extent necessary to recoup the cost of development.
- Walt Disney Internet Group (2000-2005)
At Walt Disney Internet Group (2000-2004) I was involved with a very large project called "Destination Disney." It was an 8 year project to implement CRM philosophies across Walt Disney World. The World Wide Web really took off in importance for the latter part of this project and because there were no easy ways to get marketing information from disneyworld.com to the back-end systems of Walt Disney World a solution needed to be created that would map from the "Web" world to WDW's back end systems.
We evaluated a few different ETL solutions at the time using Gartner research as a guide. We also looked at the time it would take to write it ourselves. We did an extensive evaluation and eventually selected Informatica. In this process I participated in creating the RFI and RFP as well as attending all evaluations. One other task was creating a scorecard. This scorecard was used to objectively evaluate all of the vendors as they created proof of concepts.
In the next phase of the same project as above we needed to select a J2EE application server. As the architect for this project I created the RFP and RFI as well as creating the scorecards. The evaluation was done on a purely technical basis. This was a difficult selection because the budget was very limited and our requirements very high.
- Gentiva Health Services (2005-2007)
At Gentiva Health Services (2006) as the Application Architect for the Application Development Group developing a 35 million dollar project I was responsible for designing all of the Enterprise Services. The build/buy recommendation was for a product that could handle the HIPAA X11 messages over EDI that were coming from our business partners. This product would also need to be part of a general SOA approach. Gartner and Forrester research was used to select the Vendors and establish a basic set of functionality needed in the evaluation. After meeting with the business to match the basic features from the research, I then created the RFP and RFI. I then evaluated all of the responses according to a scorecard that was approved by upper management.
After the results of the scorecard were published I created a presentation to the Director and Vice President who were in charge of Software Development and Infrastructure. This was an invaluable experience because presenting to the Director of Software development and V.P. gave me experience in using the scorecard and instead of being an argument based upon opinion, the scorecard represents an objective view of the product selection.
Next Time ... What are the steps you should take ...
0 comments:
Post a Comment