Given a choice, businesses would rather have their own tailor-made information systems than those they can simply buy from software manufacturers. Tailor-made systems are built to understand how their particular business works and how their processes are in place. Even though businesses follows the same business formats, no two business are exactly alike and no needs are exactly the same. Having a system that is made to fit into one’s existing operational procedures rather than buying a system and adapting existing operational procedures to that is a dream for a lot of companies.
Sadly, the reality is that, because of the high costs involved in employing programmers and systems analysts to actually create information systems for one’s existing operational processes, a majority of small to mid-range business owners are forced to buy from software companies certain systems and merely add or drop some of the existing functionality in a bid to customize it for their operational needs.
Of course these poses a lot of problems for the company. For one, technical support can prove to be a tricky business. Of course, the company can hire IT personnel to learn the various technical aspects of the system but when there are major problems with the system, the company is still forced to go to the official technical support team and pay yet another staggering amount to have the current system fixed. Another issue is the obsolescence of the system. Because of the rapidly changing landscape of technology these days, systems move forward at a very fast pace that one might find the system bought from some years back already becoming obsolete. This means that technical support for it may no longer be available and major upgrades are already needed. This leads to the company spending more.
This is opposed to the idea that if the company simply developed their own systems in the first place, it would be in a better position to troubleshoot it when things go wrong and to upgrade it when things have moved on.
Another difficulty I’ve seen with merely acquiring systems is when one is forced to consider other providers. Like in the case of our company, we decided to try another point of sales system just to see if the existing one we have can be improved any further. Sadly, the result was that we now have 2 very different POS system with no hope of becoming integrated. Hence, our IT staffs have to become acquainted with two different systems. Likewise, we need to maintain the 2 different system.
Yet to a mid-size company like ours, acquiring these systems, although not entirely ideal and perfect, remains to be a better alternative than having one tailor-made for us. The one-time cost it took to buy them and the subsequent costs for maintaining them remains to be significantly lower than if we hired a systems analysts and programmers to create and maintain a fully functioning information system. Although that would have been ideal, it would have been crippling in terms of costs.
Hence, acquisition of off the shelf systems have proved to be a beneficial compromise. Perhaps in the future, when the company has expanded and grown, things would change. But for now, we are forced to remain satisfied with the compromise taken.
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