6 min read

Bespoke or off-the-shelf software: are your tools adapted to you?

Sébastien Nobour

Founder of DEVEDANOS

Alternatives

For a higher-education group, we worked on the development of its apprenticeship job platform, reserved for its students. When a student looking for an apprenticeship signed up, the group’s staff filled in their candidate profile by hand, from their CV.

Are your tools adapted to the way you work, or do you have to adapt to them?

The signs that your teams are adapting to the tool

Several situations show that it is your teams who are adapting to their tools: the same information entered into several tools that do not talk to each other, the mistakes this produces, a single person in the company who keeps all of it up to date, or expensive software your teams only use part of, from a vendor that does not make the adjustments you ask for.

The same information, entered twice

When two pieces of software do not talk to each other, someone copies into one what the other contains. Each entry takes time. Each one is also a chance to make a mistake. The mistake does not show straight away. It surfaces later, when correcting it costs more.

The spreadsheet on the side

When the tool does not do what the team needs, someone builds a spreadsheet to fill the gap. The file helps, then it becomes indispensable.

When employees build their own tools like this, outside the ones the company has chosen, it is called shadow IT. Gartner, a research firm specialising in information technology, put a figure on it in its March 2023 cybersecurity predictions. In 2022, 41% of employees acquired, modified or created technology outside the visibility of their IT department. The firm predicted 75% by 2027. These figures cover companies in general, not small businesses in particular.

A spreadsheet filled in by hand has its mistakes too. In 2000, Raymond Panko, a researcher at the University of Hawaii, brought together audits of real spreadsheets carried out in companies. The most recent audits, which used the most rigorous methods, found errors in at least 86% of the files examined. Most of them counted only serious errors. A wrong figure in a spreadsheet then ends up in the decisions made from that file.

Features you pay for and do not use

Off-the-shelf software is standard software, sold ready-made and designed for a large number of companies. You pay for all of its features, whether you use them or not.

Pendo, which publishes software that measures how applications are used, gave an order of magnitude in 2019. It analysed feature usage in the software of 615 of its customers. In the average product, 80% of features were rarely or never used. The measurement covers these customers’ software, not the software small businesses buy.

Sometimes, too, a feature you need is missing. You ask the vendor for it.

So should everything be bespoke?

No. Martin Fowler dealt with the question in 2010, in a post on his blog. Fowler is Chief Scientist at Thoughtworks, a software development company, and the author of several books on software design. He is one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto, the founding text of the agile approach to software development. In that post, he draws on his career to distinguish between two kinds of software.

What separates them is not the technology, but the activity the software supports.

On one side, the activities every company has, and that set none of them apart. Payroll, for example: you just want it to work. Since the activity does not set you apart from anyone, off-the-shelf software is, for Fowler, the obvious choice. He advises buying it and adapting your way of working to the software. He also considers that customising, at great expense, a package bought for this kind of activity is a waste.

On the other side, the activities that are part of what makes a company better than its competitors. For those, Fowler rules out off-the-shelf software: using the same software as your competitors would stop you from standing out from them.

He adds that activities of this second kind are rare. In his view, they may account for 5% of the whole.

So the question in the title does not have a single answer. For payroll, or for any activity that does not set you apart, adapting to the tool is the right choice. Where the way you work makes the difference to your customers, it is up to the tool to adapt to you.

The signs described above show you where to look. When your teams work around a tool every day, ask yourself whether the activity it serves is part of what makes you better than your competitors.

Bespoke does not mean replacing everything

For the higher-education group we worked for, we focused on one specific point: filling in the candidate profile. We connected the platform to an OpenAI model: the software reads the CV and fills in the student’s candidate profile. This integration helped cut the staff’s manual data entry time by 80%, and students no longer have to type everything themselves.

In this case, adapting the tool meant adding to the platform what it was missing.

At DEVEDANOS, we work with an approach in which users judge each feature. For bespoke software development, we work to a fixed budget, invoiced at the end of each month for the work done. Your application is usable within a month, with a few essential features: your users start working with it straight away, and how they use it determines which features come next. The source code, infrastructure, deployment pipeline and documentation are your intellectual property once the first monthly invoice is paid.

Further reading

How much would software adapted to your business cost? Our article on software projects that exceed their budget explains what to compare this investment with: what the absence of that software costs you today. And if integrating an AI model interests you, our article on “your own AI” details what your company owns in that case.

If the tool you are missing is for tracking your orders, your cases or your customers, our pages on bespoke business software and bespoke CRM development describe what we build.

Are your teams re-entering the same information from one tool to the next? Shall we talk?

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