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Why  Should You Build Your Own Product?

1.By the time you finish customizing vanilla third party solutions, you might as well have built it yourself. I have observed this with every organization I know of that relies on a third-party vendor for their software solutions. All these vendors claim to be one size fits all, but that is never the case. These companies get their hooks into you and they never let go. There is no one size fits all solution in software for an entire enterprise such as Tesames. A salesman working on commission will try to convince you of this though.
2. After the product is customized to work for Tesames specific needs, an individual must have highly specialized skills to make any changes to the product. You are going to have to pay someone with those very specialized skills to do it. This is extremely expensive; it is the basic law of supply and demand.
3. Third party products like Sagitec’s NeoSpin, Salesforce, and Siebel are intentionally created in a way that forces the consumer to be dependent on their developers for maintenance or pay a large fee to train their staff to maintain the application.
4. Even with training, the staff does not have access to the proprietary source code, so there is still a dependence on the vendor’s service.
5. Much of the money that is paid to third party vendors ends up leaving the State and sometimes even the country. If we build this product ourselves, it will be built by Kansans for Kansans.
6. We currently have the skill, technology, and the willpower to successfully complete any project available to us from the individuals working in this building right now. From the design talent in communications, the subject matter experts in BMS, and the technical skill of our IT department, we as an organization can build our own products that we will all be proud of.
7. The current skill level of our IT department is exponentially greater than anything Tesames has ever experienced before. I believe some of the resistance in having internal IT staff develop the solution is because of past experiences. Tesames has some exceptional and experienced programmers now, that are eager and capable of doing exceptional work.
8. Training time for using the application will be minimized because the internal users will have more input into how they want the product to work.
9. The application will be built using the same coding concepts, principles, and technologies that companies like Salesforce, Siebel, and Microsoft use to build their products. The only difference is that we will own the source code. We will have total control of our own product.
10. The State does not have a very competitive budget for highly skilled developers. This is not a complaint; it is a reality. We need to get developers while we can afford them, before they have a lot of experience. If we can get productivity from developers with less experience, the supply of developers available to us will go up, and the cost of developers will go down. With a Tesames built solution, we will have access to our own source code. The application will be built with the technologies that they learn in college. There are even some motivated young people who have taught themselves these skills in high school.
11. With our own product, there is no contract to renew every few years. We can update the product, or not update the product, as we are ready to. We don’t have to accommodate the time schedule of another vendor.
12. Security is also improved because If we build it ourselves, there is no need to give a vendor access to private and proprietary information. This would close many security holes.