Integration assessment of an individually developed application vs.software packages from the market - an experience report

Abstract

The experience report presented here dates from a recent IT strategy project performed by a team of consultants in the software engineering sector for a client in the communications business. The client was in the process of individually developing a highly integrated, inter-organizational business support system. The corporation engaged the consultant to assess the ongoing activities, to create an alternative integration planning based on the reuse of software products and components available on the market, and finally to compare the alternatives. From this consulting project, two main results were selected for this paper. First, within twenty functional areas analyzed and compared, advantages could be found not for integrating individually developed software but instead for software packaged together from the market. Second, a selection of seven comparable case studies, despite relevant for the client's development and integration scenario, did not convey a conclusive picture pro or con individually developed software – suggesting that further critical success factors exist.