I’m looking for some statistics about the costs of homegrown development. A firm I’ve been talking to is fighting a battle with their IT department – the IT department insists on building every application themselves, while marketing and management are now leaning towards buying us (a fully-built CRM system tailored to their market).
What I don’t have are numbers that identify the cost – hidden and otherwise – of homegrown software development. This seems like something that should be easy to find, but so far I’ve come up empty. Anyone care to point me in the right direction?
2 responses to “Homegrown development stats”
They're fighting because marketing and management usually make pig-headed decisions.Answer the question, why does IT want to build it themselves? Do they have implementation concerns? What are they? Are you attempting to make a sale on the cusp of a dramatic systems re-alignment, one where your product would delay things?As far as the costs of internal development, that depends. 😉 Do they have underused programmers on staff? Is their work any good? Do they talk to the business people? Are they basing their effort on an open-source project, thus decreasing their development costs? Sometimes it's cheaper to build it than to buy it; other times, it isn't.
Here's one article that helps:http://www.inc.com/articles/it/manage_tech/manage_tech_basics/25103.html–Rick