After years in the industry, here’s my take on the build vs buy debate

I’ve been helping businesses create, deploy and operate digital products for over 20 years. I have been part of building systems as diverse as streaming cup-final football to Asia’s most passionate fans, keeping military pilots safe in the air, streamlining legal systems, launching disruptive businesses, and improving how people work together. In all that time, I have witnessed the complexities of the build vs buy debate first-hand.?

I’ve seen great successes and gargantuan project failures. Etched in my mind is an Audit-General’s report - a project years delayed and cost twice as much as originally budgeted, tens of millions of dollars extra spent! Other projects were full of small disappointments and the silly mistakes made when things are crafted from the ground up. Some things seem obvious, but are actually hard to avoid, like performance bottlenecks and security flaws that grow to cause major problems.?

I have sat with business leaders and heard their frustrations about not getting what they want, and more importantly not knowing how to get what they want even when there is great strategic alignment in an organisation. When you have a digital product that needs creating, what do you do? Build it from the ground up and have total control? Or buy what you need and amend as needed??

On the one hand, building things takes time. Once a product is live, even more time is needed to identify and correct overlooked user needs and inevitable bugs. Then there’s the support and maintenance phase, which is not as interesting as the build phase. A new, disruptive business unit can struggle to retain talent when the initial fun stuff is over, and a brain-drain can kill an initiative.?

On the other hand, buying and extending package software can require painful hacks to get any particular process or problem to fit into a package. Shoehorning niche processes or local regulations into packaged software can mean things never quite work, and create a huge support overhead.??

Step back to watch, and you’ll see teams start with package software, get disappointed, and then build their own products. Or, teams fail on the quest to build their own products and get replaced by a new team using package software.?

It’s a vicious cycle but it can be broken! It is possible to have the best of both worlds - a software platform that takes care of the hard things that just have to work, like performance, scalability, security, and infrastructure management, while at the same time providing the easiest to use and most powerful rapid building tools for app creators. With drag and drop capabilities for the things that should just be simple, this package also provides the flexibility to create a completely customise app or digital product and incorporate complex logic, business rules and permissions.?

This is powerful, because it means teams can stop wasting effort on things that don’t add value (but are essential requirements) while still having complete freedom to craft the features that address their unique use case.?

For example, you may be a professional services firm who wants to compete with a more nimble, well funded fin-tech who is disrupting, say, the deals advisory market. With a software platform that combines the best of build and buy, you can easily have a production-ready, fully-compliant product ready for launch in 7 weeks.?

Sounds like a dream come true? It’s not!?

Freedom is the main thing I love about what my team offers businesses - freedom to realise their product ambitions, freedom to be agile, and freedom to go fast! We help organisations and individuals achieve outcomes at pace. And they can do it without compromising security, performance and cost-effectiveness.?

We’re entering a new era of digital product creation and I am excited to be part of it. I don’t see the build vs buy debate dying down anytime soon. It is changing though. It’ll soon be build, buy or assemble - and go fast? I know which I’ll be choosing.