Does your internally developed application creak like an old pickup truck?

Businesses in all kinds of industries and of all sizes can face the problem that they have an internally built application which is central to running the business, but it is buggy and held together by patches. In other words, it's more like an old Datsun than a new Ford F-150. Applications grow old for a number of reasons, such as:

?The underlying technologies such as the server hardware, the operating system, or the database software get stale.
?The application is poorly documented and only one or two key people understand how it works
?Customers want new features, but the application wasn't built in such a way that supports easy additions

We recently were engaged on a project just like this where our customer was facing all three problems with his application, but it was still central to his business.

The client is a leading company in the energy space, providing electricity, invoicing and reporting to both its customers and suppliers in a large geographic area. The current system has been developed over the years providing exceptional service and support to those customers and suppliers. With the company having aggressive growth plans, though, they realized the application may not be able to scale to meet the potential demand and began looking for a solution. We were able to walk them through a series of steps to help them better understand what to do.

Out of our experience with this and other customers, we have a few suggestions to help keep your business from facing these problems:

1.Create an inventory of important, internal, custom built applications serving the business
2.Determine if there are off-the-shelf applications that can accomplish the same thing
3.Determine if there is reasonable business documentation describing the application, its function and value
4.Assess the actual code to determine if it has been written with modern technology and has been documented and can meet the future needs of the business
5.Determine if there are security threats associated with the applications and databases

As always, we'd love to hear your stories as well. Please don't hesitate to touch base.

Bruce and Jim Managing Partners

 [email protected]/ [email protected]

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