Last week I talked about how small businesses couldn’t afford to invest in technology projects that didn’t show immediate returns. I offered that 30 days is the outer limit of acceptable time to implementation.

So how does a small business get anything meaningful done within 30 days?

Automate a specific business activity that you already do and understand. Automate just that activity. This will help you get something that can show an immediate return for your business because it will have a clearly defined purpose. This may seem kind of hard to understand, or confusing. If it does it’s probably because we’re so used to buying packaged software, which is commonly referred to as “Commercial Off the Shelf Software”.

Naturally this becomes an acronym COTS because computer concepts seem to get acronyms quicker than, well, anything I can think of.

COTS is targeted to many customers in many different business environments. Most small businesses only have experience buying this kind of prepackaged software, and so really struggle with purchasing custom developed software. For many business applications COTS software is just fine because the costs of buying it and deploying it can be very low compared to custom application development.

Custom application development is completely different from buying software off the shelf and implementing it. In this post I’ll talk about the three biggest mistakes that small businesses make when they approach custom application development projects as if they were buying off the shelf software.

These three mistakes are based on approaching custom software developers with these questions:

• We’re used to buying software from a catalog and making it work, why can’t we just treat this like that?
• We can’t decide what features are really going to be useful so why don’t we just ask for everything and then see what we can afford?
• Finally the biggest mistake everyone makes. We don’t want to spend alot of time on this internally so can you just build for us what everyone else in our business asks you to build so we can spend as little time on it as possible?

The three mistakes, expanded on

We’re used to buying software from a catalog and making it work, why can’t we just treat this like that?

If you pay custom application development prices to build a system that works and acts like an off the shelf solution, you will be paying for a lot more development than you need to automate a specific business process. Custom Application development is more expensive than off the shelf software precisely because it’s only used by the business that pays for it’s development. The problem with approaching custom application development shops with this question is that you are asking them to build you a custom solution as if it was an off the shelf product.

If you continually find yourself asking this question you might want to consider why you need custom application development at all. Most startups and small businesses do use off the shelf software for almost all their information management needs. It works fine because these businesses are trying to figure out what to do to become profitable enough to survive.

Eventually you will find that specific business processes just can’t be as effective as they should be without custom application development. You could come up with a metric and develop a measurement tool to figure out which processes are good candidates for custom application development, but most business managers can tell, just based on their own intuition, which processes would offer the most value if they were automated. This will occur when your off the shelf software starts to feel specific business process:

They will say things like:

We’re using (Insert COTS software here) and it’s working ok, but..:

• We need something that works exactly the way our business works
• We are getting it done now but it takes too long
• We only have one person in the office that can get it to work

If you find yourself saying these things, you are well advised to getting a quote on custom software development for your business.

If you need more specific, measurable reasons to describe why those processes should be automated with custom application development, well consider your project important enough to track. That’s a good thing! Here’s how I translate the feelings above to business objectives that can be mapped to an overall strategy for the business.

We could automate this specific business processes with Off the Shelf software but we’d rather build our own solution, because custom software development:

1. will make it harder for our competitors to copy our automation, so it provides sustainable growth opportunities
2. will make it much more cost effective to optimize the business process to a large number of transactions
3. will lower the learning curve while allowing more people to participate in managing this process for both current and new employees

We can’t decide what features are really going to be useful so why don’t we just ask for everything and then see what we can afford?

Custom Developed Software is purpose built so it requires you to have a clearly defined purpose. Software developers can make computers do pretty much anything you want them to do. If they couldn’t, they wouldn’t be very good software developers. Asking your software development vendors to quote you “everything” produces confusion and delay.

We don’t want to spend a lot of time on this internally so can you just build for us what everyone else in our business asks you to build so we can spend as little time on it as possible?

This is the biggest mistake you can make. It’s also the most insidious which is why i’ve saved it for last. If you spend money on building a custom software solution that just does what everyone else in your business is doing.. you are spending money implementing automation that doesn’t make your business more effective than your competitors. In fact by not describing a specific process that is unique to your business, you are almost guaranteed to spend money making your business less effective than your competitors. I’m going to repeat that, becuase it bears repeating.

You are almost guaranteed to spend money making your business less effective than your competitors

Your competitors are not going to show you exactly how their internal processes complement and augment their offline processes if they represent a competitive advantage. Any automated system must complement and augment an offline business processes that exists in the configuration of the business. This relationship may be something structured and described, like a general policies and procedures manual. More likely it’s an oral tradition that is passed from experienced employees to new hires through training and business practice adjustments. Without knowing how the automated system and the configuration of the business match up, your chances of getting both sides of this right are extremely low. So low your probably going to waste all of your money if you just do it anyway.

If you can’t spend the time describing the whole process to your software development vendor, either in writing or during prototype and development status updates, you will, at a minimum, fail to create a growth opportunity. Make the commitment to do that, or don’t bother starting the project.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 4th, 2006 at 6:07 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.