Some companies prefer to own all their own applications, Ferrari says, but as long as you research a provider’s security precautions to ensure that your data will be safe on their servers, on-demand can be a solid alternative. “On-demand software generally will put 80 percent of what most people want in the software, and 20 percent will probably be customized,” she says. “So there’s a considerable amount of intellectual capital already there that our customers can share.”

 

How to Select a Custom Software Builder

If you’ve decided that your company really does need custom software—and, like most companies, you don’t have the resources or expertise to do it yourselves—your choice of a software developer is extremely important.

Some of the factors to consider are obvious. For instance, never choose a first-time developer. Try to find someone with significant expertise in your field, not just in a particular programming language. You should ask for references, of course; and depending on the nature and secrecy of the software involved, you may be able to have a programmer look at the actual code that’s been written for another customer to judge how well it’s been done.

Some published standards and methodologies exist for the software writing industry. One that is employed by many of the largest development firms is the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), developed in the mid-1980s by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. CMM and other standards provide a way to stabilize and manage the software-construction process so as to make it more repeatable and traceable. In other words, other programmers could look at it and trace how the original developer’s code works.

Chris Sawotin, vice president of solutions and sales at SafeNet Consulting, says CMM and similar methodologies take a little bit of the risk out of hiring someone. “The thing is, if you don’t have repeatable process, you end up with chaos,” he says. “I’m not necessarily wedded to a particular process—I’m fairly agnostic, I would say.” But Sawotin emphasizes that developers should follow a standard to maintain efficiency and process repeatability.

But don’t rule out a company just because it doesn’t subscribe to a published standard, says Nicholas Eian, CEO of Endurant Business Solutions. If you have software written for you, you just need to make sure that it is solidly built, “which means a lot of extensive testing,” he says. “They have to have a very structured development approach.”

Above all, says Eian, make sure the developer offers an ironclad support contract. How long will installation take, and will there be a trainer on hand? What happens if something breaks down? How will you upgrade the package in the future? The company should offer its people and resources for implementation and support.

“You have to have an agreed-upon plan as to how they’re going to support it,” Eian says. “You should never have to bring it in house and expect your internal staff to support it. It’s very difficult and costly to get them trained and up to speed to take something like that on.”

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