Exemplifying Schumpeter’s “Creative Destruction,” technological churn takes a heavy toll on small and medium-sized business IT organizations’ ability to keep up. What we found from our clients is that application development is one of the biggest challenges they face. Needs outpace their ability to deliver.
This applies both to internal applications (e.g., database integration, CRM customization) and external applications (e.g., SaaS products). Rapidly evolving specifications and expectations hinder IT’s ability to deliver to organizational needs using only internal resources. We get it.
Interestingly, we’ve found that applications across companies/organizations share a large percentage of common functionality. Yet because these organizations are separate, they all re-create the same code independently. That led us to develop our design accelerator, a collection of common code blocks that both reduce both cost and development times by up to 50%, all while often exceeding quality standards.
One example is Caseglide. They are a small Florida startup creating case management software for law firms and other organizations in the law industry. They brought us in to help them customize their CRM (we do a lot of customization jobs of off-the-shelf software) and rapidly saw the limitations of the core commercial program. We put a proposal together to leverage our accelerator and create a custom commercial platform around which to build their business. Fast forward to today and they are seeing rapid adoption of their product and experiencing tremendous growth.
Of course, the application development process can be a core function within an organization, the output of which is often mission critical. Some organizations decide that keeping that in house is absolutely necessary. But our clients have found that turning that over to a highly-experienced partner that can leverage its scale and experience delivered robust, compelling applications that exceeded goals of cost, time, and quality.
The days of a small or medium business being able to manage their entire application development process while maximizing competitiveness are transitioning over to outsourcing of development of those applications to free up time for them to focus on their true core competence and drive market success.
