Building and buying, small style

Dear Bob ... In a recent Advice Line you referred to the "buy when you can, build when you have to" philosophy that dominates IT these days. That's fine for a large enterprise that can afford to implement an ERP system. How about us small shops? Is that still the right way to look at IT architecture - with IT playing the part of integrator more than developer? Or does the situation change when the size gets smal

Dear Bob ...

In a recent Advice Line you referred to the "buy when you can, build when you have to" philosophy that dominates IT these days. That's fine for a large enterprise that can afford to implement an ERP system. How about us small shops? Is that still the right way to look at IT architecture - with IT playing the part of integrator more than developer? Or does the situation change when the size gets small?

- Grasshopper

Dear Minty ...

Quite the opposite, I'd think. For the most part, a small business has fewer resources than a large one for custom development. The better news is that small businesses can make use of less-expensive, feature-rich alternatives that large enterprises have to reject because of their lack of scalability.

A simple example is Act! - still the most popular sales force automation package when viewed from the perspective of people who actually sell. A small business can base its sales effectiveness automation on it, where a larger one has to go to something larger and more cumbersome.

The best news of all is that a small business rarely needs the level of sophistication that a larger one needs with respect to integration. A large enterprise probably needs a combination of ETL (Extract, Translate and Load) tools (for batch, point-to-point integration); EAI (enterprise application integration) software for many-to-many real-time transaction-level integration; and data warehouse/data mining/business intelligence systems for consolidated analysis.

A small business, in contrast, can probably do very well establishing a single, consolidated data store. It can feed this batch-mode from its purchased applications (Act! being an example) and use it for all reporting, and to synchronize redundant data fields.

The difficult part for IT in a small business is forgetting the ongoing expense associated with development. A programmer in this kind of environment can easily spot a business opportunity for automation and build a solution in Access or some other rapid development tool. The result is very effective and perfectly tailored to the business.

Then the programmer leaves, and somebody else has to figure the thing out. It's generally a better idea in the long run to buy something that's close enough.

- Sensei

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