Thinking about typical Enterprise Technology software within an organisation
Enterprises have a combination of;

• Proprietary
• Bespoke (Outsourced)
• In-house

Enterprise technology tries to solve business problems by using the right technology.  Organisations can have in-house expertise that is top quality, focusing on specific technologies, more generalist, and with a better understanding of the problem domain.

Organisations insource to try and find;

• Additional capacity to deliver more work
• Expertise that does not exist within the organisation
• Specialist support on specialist software
• Highly experienced professionals
  

Sadly this is where the insourcing challenge repeatedly costs more.

Procurement challenges from insourcing staff

Note, that there are many success stories from insourcing. We want to highlight some of the challenges though.

Agencies

Using agencies can reduce overhead in terms of sourcing and hiring personnel. Often the agents themselves don’t have the underlying technological understanding of your organisation they won’t understand the Technologies and often the emphasis on the client to verify they are happy with the candidate.  Agency hires will have to be absorbed into your personnel structure and the time taken to do this can prove expensive. Contractors can sometimes struggle to work together well with permanent staff. Another big challenge with insourcing through agencies is that the staff are individually picked, meaning they are not likely to have work together previously.

Software Consultancies

Software consultancies are supposed to retain client domain knowledge, facilitating better continuity of service delivery than hiring individual contractors through agencies. The results are mixed, but the costs always a lot higher. Consultancies are best engaged where they have knowledge that is specialist and harder to acquire, for example, a piece of software, or some business area. Consultancies do make a lot of sense for certain enterprises.

The secret that few software projects reveal

At Info Rhino we have a style when developing software. We think about the convention, configuration, dynamic, and reusable components. We have created solutions that are flexible and reusable. This reduces the time spent implementing large data projects.  we’ve done this on many client sites, it seems to be a trend that concerns us. At a time when companies are facing ever-increasing challenges costs-wise, their software development life cycle (SDLC) is not optimal in reducing costs.  Enterprise technology tends to run projects on a budgetary basis. These projects mostly happen due to sponsorship from business teams. Projects that could benefit from reusable components won’t do so because it doesn’t seem to be aligned with the business needs.  Organisations can’t implement cross-cutting solutions because they implement the technology on a project-by-project basis.

Even within projects, project code becomes a copy and paste implementations that can be expensive to upgrade. The result can be the “Big ball of mud” and fairly rapid system replacement.

Website reporting projects

When we are engaged onsite for client projects, the remit can vary immensely.  We have contracted on two separate in-house website reporting projects. On both occasions, the solution had already been architected, we were focusing more on other requirements. On both occasions, rather than building they powerful reporting component for tabling and charting data, the clients had built large amounts of code per report. Most of this code could have been removed and replaced with a few key components that worked with the data.

Changing your approach to building technology, saving money through outsourcing

In our example on website reporting,  the work can already be implemented if the damage had already been done.  There was either an existing technology of framework that could solve another problem they were trying to achieve or a separate company developing these components would have been a far better way to deliver the project. The in-house technology team can focus on the business domain requirements, the outsourcing company can focus on building the components to plugin to their solution.

Once we start thinking this way, we only see opportunities for cost savings within our enterprise.  When we discuss common enterprise problems faced by outsourcing consultants, suddenly problems can be solved by solutions without over-burdening in-house technology teams.

Cloud solution architecture and outsourcing software development

For many enterprises, cloud solutions are a fantastic way to reduce costs. For other organisations cloud solutions can be very expensive, hard to manage, and reduce the capability of the organisation.  This article is not attempting to review the merits and demerits of cloud-based architecture.  One inescapable truth with regards to cloud vs on-premise architecture is the maturity of older on-premise technologies versus cloud.  Cloud services typically have web front ends and portals that are catching up with the far more superior on-premise solutions. Clients who may not have been that familiar with the more advanced features of on-premise server software have the mental capability to use similar approaches in the cloud. It makes perfect sense to use an outsourcing company to develop your enterprise solution architecture, rather than trying to struggle to do this in-house.

Final thoughts on why outsourcing is the go-to solution for enterprises wishing to to flourish in the upcoming economic uncertainty

Outsourcing in the wrong way can prove disastrous. In-sourcing can also provide many challenges. Neither should be discounted. Our article focuses presents the idea of creating modular, reusable, software that can help make your enterprise more efficient. We are not saying that agencies and consultancies are a thing of the past, but in many circumstances, certain budget spending should be spent on more reusable technology.

We would like to thank you for taking the time to read this article, and also BriskStar for letting us put out valuable ideas on outsourcing to a wider audience.

www.inforhino.co.uk/contact 

About the author of this article

Info Rhino Limited (www.inforhino.co.uk) is a UK-based technology solutions software provider.  We have worked with Enterprises delivering data-focused solutions for many years have our own products which we are looking to bring to markets, and we offer outsourcing solutions for the UK and non-UK companies. We are particularly keen on networking with companies within our field to increase the service offering to our clients hence why we have an article featured on BriskStar.