I think it’s good to buy something if you can use it immediately without much customization. If you have to do a lot of customization it’s not that clear. For example we have bought a system that requires extensive customization and a lot of people are starting to wonder if the total effort of building from scratch that does wha we need and not more would have been less than the never ending customizations of a system that can do way more than we need.
There is also the question of brain drain. The IT department in my company has outsourced a lot of the tech work to the point that there aren’t many people left who are capable of making informed purchasing decisions. They mostly read sales presentations, white papers and Gardner reports but they have no ability to really assess things. This shows in them repeatedly buying expensive systems that never get really used.
I can attest that the sales presentations tend to be overly optimistic and cheery and if the head guy really wants a given solution, from office politics perspective, you might as well just nod your head, point out the issues you think should be addressed just so that you are covered and roll with it. In practical terms, the decision is not up to you.
In one of my previous roles, manager simply said it is happening ( so it did ), spent some time with the system not fully understanding the underlying logic and was somewhat surprised, when it did not work as advertised. IT had to get involved to smooth some edges. The roll out was still painful. But the contract was already signed and the advertised feature shown during presentation was now extra money, so we were forced to use incomplete product. Annoying.
But then, the real answer is that it varies. Everyone needs to do their due diligence.
What I did not notice is that managers see pretty dashboard and fail to consider the use of the rank and file users. This is the one thing I have learned from all this.
Never underestimate the impact of a pretty dashboard.
That is integration and evolution costs on the article. Those tend to be very hard to estimate, and are the ones that most grow out of control. The article really doesn't do them justice by passing through them like if they were like the others.
There is also an undereported gain that is freeing your team to work on higher impact work.
The issue is really about missing requirements... we spent 1,500 dev hours customizing something only to realize we were using the wrong tool for what we wanted... kinda hard to sunk costs that one.
I think they would produce better outcomes if they understood or used the the systems they are buying or at least listened to actual users. I bet healthcare.gov would have gone better if some high level people had actually have tried to sign up for themselves.
There is also the question of brain drain. The IT department in my company has outsourced a lot of the tech work to the point that there aren’t many people left who are capable of making informed purchasing decisions. They mostly read sales presentations, white papers and Gardner reports but they have no ability to really assess things. This shows in them repeatedly buying expensive systems that never get really used.