The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center took things in a similar direction. In the late 1990s, UPMC was looking for a PACS (picture-archiving communications system) to convert radiology film to digital images for easier storage, viewing, and analysis. The problem was that none of the PACS vendors at the time offered a product that would display images on standard PCs.

With the help of an informatics lab on campus, UPMC developed its own PACS, still in use today. Soon after, UPMC partnered with venture capitalists to launch Stentor (a company that Philips Medical later acquired) to take ownership of product development.

Commercialization helped lower the risk in long-term support and maintenance. “We saw that the only way it could be really successful for the long-term was to get it outside of UPMC,” says Duane Falk, UPMC’s director of enterprise middleware. Falk also notes that having ample resources (250 developers in a total IT staff of 900), a sophisticated development culture (relying upon the Carnegie Mellon Capability Maturity Model), and an on-site lab makes major development decisions less of a gamble. “For us, it’s not so much starting from scratch,” he says.

Shaking the decision tree

Other models are emerging that blur the line between build and buy. In an SOA, for example, business processes are broken down into coarse-grained application components -- which are beginning to be standardized and offered individually by independent players such as StrikeIron. The major enterprise software vendors, including Oracle, SAP, and Siebel, are also moving toward component-based models, although it remains unclear whether this will result in licensing of individual components to customers.

“I believe we’re moving toward a model where the components are being commoditized and eventually I can go buy that service that I need,” says DC-Stat’s Thomas.

But enterprise IT can never completely escape the past.

“I always say, never start with a blank slate,” advises John Pierce, vice president of global solutions for insurance at Patni Computer Systems, provider of on-site and off-site outsourcing services for midsize to large enterprises.

“You can’t discount the legacy environment,” Pierce says. “It runs your business from day-to-day.”

Pierce says it all starts with defining business processes in the right way. “Business processes are often inward-focused versus outward-focused on the customer,” he warns.

Increasingly, the asset-management approach to lining up data for decision-making is cropping up in IT environments, Lutchen says. “Spreadsheets are not enough. You need ... a systemic way to collect this data.”

Tools such as IT resource planning software (which he describes as “ERP for IT”) can help IT organizations assemble a complete picture of assets and requirements such as people, skills, compliance needs, budget, hardware and software, technology architecture, and so on. The best bet, Lutchen advises, is to collect and present the data, with detailed options and consequences, to business stakeholders. Then, let them make the decision.

That approach can help mitigate political battles, but inevitably, politics is the nasty beast always lurking beneath the surface of any technology decision. Do the best you can to empathize with stubborn stakeholders, Motorola’s Redshaw advises, and learn to compromise on lower-priority projects. “Sometimes there are emotional battles that aren’t worth it,” he says. “Focus on the areas where you really feel you can make a difference  in terms of saving money.”