STEP 6: MAKE THE BUY OR BUILD DECISION

You are now in a position to make a fundamental decision. Should you at-
tempt to develop the application software yourself or with others, or should you
acquire a software package? Within this question are several others:
• If you develop it yourself, what types of tools will you use? Who will do
the work?
• If you acquire a package, what software modifications will be needed? Who
will make these changes? What vendor support will be required?
There are a number of factors in uencing the answers to these questions.
These include the following:

•
Availability of the current IT staff to do development
. The IT staff already is
filled up with work. Adding more work means that something has to give.
•
Skills and knowledge of the current IT staff
. If you have selected a technol-
ogy direction and architecture that are foreign to the staff, you must allow
for a learning curve if you do development internally.
•
Availability and skill levels of the vendor
. The vendor includes both the
supplier of the software package directly as well as the staff of the
underlying database management system or Fourth Generation Language.
•
Availability, skills, and costs of consultants
. These consultants can aid you
in implementing a package or in supporting new development.
Due to the importance of this decision, you should proceed discretely.