Comment by wvenable
Comment by wvenable 2 days ago
I've had the opposite experience. Any attempt to adapt processes to an off-the-shell tool have always been a subpar experience for everyone. I've brought a few of these in house as fully custom software and the end result has been a better user experience and faster changes. If we can buy something that fits the need, we will. But if we can't, we build. And we build a fair bit.
I disagree with "the organization is likely less unique than you think". If you're big enough you will have unique requirements that nobody else has. I'm in the middle of that now in a project to install some industry standard software that runs the whole business and we have to customize and add custom integration into it. I wouldn't want to build software this complex in house but if I was given the resources and tasked to do it, I could, and it would be better.
There are two different scenarios.
Scenario 1: You're doing something that every other business is doing. E.g. ERP/accounting, sales, contact center, etc.
Scenario 2: You're doing something few other businesses are doing. E.g. your actual customer business, creative, etc.
(1) is amenable to making your process fit software, to good results. (2) is usually a train wreck.
Unfortunately, figuring out if your thing is scenario 1 or 2 is non-trivial.
Canonical example: EMR/EHR systems in healthcare. You think they'd be the same... but actually there are so many integrations with other systems and/or different sorts of specialists, that a real world implementation has substantial functionality gaps (papered over with custom work).