Stop rubbing your software

ITIL

If you still do it, stop. This is absolutely the final chance for you to stop it.

I am talking about software and how to use them. It does not matter if you are a CIO providing software solutions to your own organisation or a SaaS-provider, providing software from a fancy multi-tenant application environment.

Doing your own stuff made sense when solutions were developed by small companies, even smaller than your own. They just had the basic functions and user interfaces were clumsy. People were unfamiliar with IT and wanted everything look and work exactly as they used to have (in analog or digital).

Once I was part of a identical CRM-project two times in a row. First project took more than two years and the result was less than satisfactory. The second one took four months and everyone was happy. The biggest difference between the projects was, that the second company adopted the best practise processes of the application vendor as their own. The first one was more keen on forcing their own (old) processes and every button needed to be at the right place. Can you guess what happened when it was time for major version/feature update?

Another time I saw a huge development and customisation project around the first versions of “certain” very popular cloud portal. They did over 5.000 hours of work. After two months of the completion, the vendor rolled out their first version update to the cloud. Customised application died, totally. People were not pleased.

One company made a huge extension to third party cloud solution. The extension was meant to be core of their business model. After couple of months, the cloud vendor released a version, which included everything and more that the small company has made. If was the end of that small company.

The examples go just on and on…

So why am I right and you are wrong? I am not right, but the megavendors are. If major players invest billions of dollars for research and development work and they have constant feedback of even hundreds of millions users, what is the odds that you are the only person or organisation inventing a place that should be developed better?

The best part of modern cloud-based SaaS-solutions is that they force you to update newer versions. Essentially, that means best practise processes, future-proof compatibility and more security than you could ever achieve in your customised application environment.

Most CEO’s and some CIO’s think that their business is different. Well, it is not. Not at least from the information technology point of view. Of course there are exceptions and very specialised industries, but I challenge you to try! Next time when you do a transformation, do it the standard way. Use the common processes, API’s and integrations, but do not customise the applications. After a while, you will be surprised how good it actually works and when it is time for update, you will have a smile and reasonable budget!