I’m looking for some statistics about the costs of homegrown development. A firm I’ve been talking to is fighting a battle with their IT department – the IT department insists on building every application themselves, while marketing and management are now leaning towards buying us (a fully-built CRM system tailored to their market).
What I don’t have are numbers that identify the cost – hidden and otherwise – of homegrown software development. This seems like something that should be easy to find, but so far I’ve come up empty. Anyone care to point me in the right direction?
They're fighting because marketing and management usually make pig-headed decisions.
ReplyDeleteAnswer the question, why does IT want to build it themselves? Do they have implementation concerns? What are they? Are you attempting to make a sale on the cusp of a dramatic systems re-alignment, one where your product would delay things?
As far as the costs of internal development, that depends. ;-) Do they have underused programmers on staff? Is their work any good? Do they talk to the business people? Are they basing their effort on an open-source project, thus decreasing their development costs? Sometimes it's cheaper to build it than to buy it; other times, it isn't.
Here's one article that helps:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.inc.com/articles/it/manage_tech/manage_tech_basics/25103.html
--Rick