Should I Build or Should I Buy

A company is in permanent beta: there is always something to improve. Let’s say you spend 15 minutes a day reading spams. Compounded over a year, that’s three days out the window. Chances are you’re not the only one losing time on junk mails, so go ahead and multiply those 3 days by your company’s size: something as simple as an email filter can save days of work. Those tiny details eventually stack up and can make or break a business.

Now, what can we do about all those hours wasted updating spreadsheets by hand? Do we leave things the way they are, or do we address this issue? This is where software comes into play. According to Deloitte’s 2018 survey on global outsourcing, 9 organizations out of 10 are considering or adopting cloud solutions to gain a competitive advantage.

Your competitors are already on the move, and those with the right digital products are expected to win. The question becomes: should we build those products ourselves, or should we buy them?

An easy mantra to follow would be to outsource anything that’s not part of your core activities: if it’s none of your business, pay someone else to do the job. Instead of engaging in satellite activities, teams are expected to focus on talking to their customers and delivering value to them. 

According to Deloitte still, a third of the companies surveyed expect cloud services contracting to decrease their operational costs by at least 11%. Buying ready-to-use software removes the need for research, development, and maintenance costs. In the U.S. in 2017, software developers made a median salary of $50 per hour, so paying $5 per employee for something as complex as a project management tool becomes a no-brainer.

More than a cost-saving strategy, value is being achieved by driving innovation, developing flexibility, and increasing operational speed: employees can get work done better because it takes less time and it helps them adopt best practices. It’s even more true for small and medium-sized businesses where the resources are more limited, by definition.

Software is becoming a commodity and it doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel. We don’t think twice about buying Microsoft Office, Photoshop, or a Windows license, so why should it be different with cloud solutions? 

On the other hand, making great software is getting increasingly complex. It’s not as simple as patching up some code and hope for the best: most projects take months to complete and there is a non-negligible chance that the initial product requirements don’t meet the needs of the end-users.