Categories
Blog

4 reasons why bespoke software development may be the right choice

Is bespoke development always the expensive option?

It is hard to think of a business today that does not rely on software to improve efficiency, compliance or reaching customers. As businesses grow the opportunity to encapsulate functions and processes within an information system increases. Indeed, your software may define your business success.

One of the first questions our customers ask is ‘what off the shelf solutions are there?’. Often there are candidates and the next question is ‘will this off the shelf solution meet my needs and provide the cheapest option?’

Assessing potential candidates is not easy – in reality, its only once you are using the software that you can evaluate if it really fits your requirements. Making the wrong choice causes disruption, demoralises staff and makes you look bad. Assessing candidate software is not just ticking features off the checklist. It is about how the software will help grow your business – how the software fits the way you do business, how useable it is, how it will evolve to meet your changing needs and in so doing create great solutions.

There are times when it is also worth considering custom or “bespoke” software developed precisely for your needs, rather than what is available off the shelf.

Let’s look at four compelling reasons for bespoke software

  1. The value of any software can be measured by uptake; either by your customers or internally. While customer uptake is easier to measure, a low internal uptake may just seem like staff being lazy, or they seem to need a lot of training – it may just be that the software is hard to use. The greatest chance you have for achieving a solution that exactly meets your needs is by building it that way.

Workflow – Your software should reflect the efficient way you wish to manage business. As the creator of Visual Basic, Alan Cooper described, software should take away the pain. The worst case is an off the shelf solution simply does not fit with your workflow – and forces your business to needlessly change instead.

Functionality – Build only what you need and make the experience satisfying to users – great software should be a delight to use. Feature laden off the shelf solutions add no value if these features are not used. In fact, they reduce the value as users navigate through a mess of user interface that is irrelevant. As a subscriber of an off the shelf solution you are paying for all features even if this cost is spread over many more subscribers.

  1. Software innovation has proven to turn problems into unique solutions.

Software not only has the potential to increase the efficiency of your current business processes it can analyse and solve challenges and connect people so that problems are now unique solutions for you and your customers. Indeed, today businesses have innovated with bespoke software to create solutions that are the reason for their phenomenal growth. They haven’t achieved this with off the shelf software their moderately performing competitors are using.

  1. Your business needs and opportunities should drive your development roadmap.

In our software development business, we use agile processes and lean development to ensure you are buying functionality that has the highest priority for your business growth. You are in control. Providers of off the shelf products must meet the needs of a diverse user group. If you can see the providers roadmap you may be surprised just how long you may wait for your features; at worst your highest priority requirements may not even be on the roadmap. In such case you will need the provider to undertake bespoke development. Often they will do this when it is convenient and there is little incentive for their price to be competitive.

  1. The very process of planning and undertaking bespoke development can have wider benefits in reviewing your processes – leading to innovation in the way you do business

When we develop software, we use Design Thinking to understand the business goal and innovate with you – not just with the software but also the interaction with people, processes, hardware and data. As a result, your unique world view and people can unleash transformations well beyond the software.

This is not an exhaustive list of benefits in bespoke development but focusses on four areas often unaccounted or undervalued.  In summary bespoke development can be the best option where uptake is essential, where innovation can lead to business growth and where a business wants a competitive solution.