In today’s corporate environment, organizations are continually investing in IT systems for 5 core reasons:

• increase productivity
• information delivery and intelligence
• cost reduction
• collaboration
• improving customer service.

Increasing business needs and the evolving nature of business operations demands decisions to be made in investing in one or more systems. From small start-up companies to large multi-national organizations, investment in IT Applications has become a compulsory expenditure.

TREND

The trend in the type of systems developed has evolved over time. Smaller companies earlier invested very little in IT Systems because the investment was too large. Most opted for one off development of custom systems when the need arose. Larger organizations however, relied on the tech titans of the day, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP for their systems. Any development on these needed developers and consultants trained on those platforms and were hired by these organizations to maintain and customize these particular systems. The following were the costs associated with investing in the above systems:

1. Platform license costs
2. Implementation and customizations
3. Hiring of certified resources on the platform
4. Continuous training of resources on the platform

Then came the “open-source” culture where no investment was needed to learn a development platform. Open source languages and platforms like PHP, Linux, MYSQL etc, opening the programming and system development world to more people. This increased the cost of expert consulting on the titan platforms. It also created a market from the small and medium businesses where they could, for a lesser amount automate basic processes and invest in systems.

The open source technology had some negative impacts, some of which included the fact that there was an abundance of “sub-par”, non-scalable systems with poor usability in the market. Many organizations and companies complaining the lack of ROI from systems they invested in.

User Experience Design was introduced into the development world. Most agile development methodologies designed nowadays take into account the user needs and business needs for a system. Companies like Google have benefited from focusing on user experience and needs. Google, now a tech titan in its own right has created products that are preferred by most users worldwide, because they focused on how users want to use systems, and making them affordable.

The introduction of cloud hosting facilities(IaaS) by companies Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud also increased organizations confidence in systems development, where the most users who needed systems accessible from anywhere at any time, could now get that. Cloud infrastructure ensures reliability, security and availability which are key for all systems.

Today in application development

The availability of Open source technologies, Cloud infrastructure and development methodologies that focus on the user and processes, have seen many tech companies develop out of the box business solutions for companies of all sizes. Such solutions include, CRM solutions, HR solutions, BI solutions, email solutions e.t.c.

When considering investing in a system to match business needs organizations today are now faced with two major decisions:

1. To invest in an out of the box solution that exists in the market place
2. Develop a custom solution

Such a decision requires a review of the current business environment and the needs of individual users. Assess your business needs from an IT perspective, analyze user needs for a particular system and assess which of the two options is suitable for the organizations considering factors like:

1. Systems adaptability with the evolving business environment
2. Scalability of the system to sustain business goals
3. Integration of the system with other systems in the environment

The end goal is to ensure that maximum ROI is achieved from your investment, and that whatever system is implemented will sustain you and your business through its growth