Enterprise software solutions are a messy game, we can do better

The world of corporate digital innovation is stuck in an impasse created by risk averse bureaucracy and greed. But, times are changing.

Five to ten years ago corporate organisations were working solely with larger software vendors for their digital projects. Currently, smaller boutique sized product development companies are slowly taking over. These companies bring a fresh approach to how digital products and services are being built and often beat the old school vendors on speed, agility, and quality.

The majority of these new age product development companies truly want to solve problems and won’t be happy with doing the same thing over and over again. Wondering how this is helping? Stick with me.

Off-the-shelf vs. bespoke digital solutions

A lot of corporates want off-the-shelf digital solutions. Why? Many reasons, from ‘less maintenance’ to ‘cost reducing benefits’. Let’s say there lies truth in these arguments, but there might be a bigger reason for corporates to want off-the-shelf solutions. Many corporates like to push off responsibility and thus liability to other parties. This is slowing down innovation and reducing the chances on success within digital projects.

On the other end there are large organisations who, at all costs, want to own the intellectual property on all of the digital solutions they use, and thus are moving towards bespoke digital solutions that are being built for them and under their IP. At first you might think this is smarter, since this approach allows companies to create digital products which are actually tailored to their end-users’ needs and to the problem the product is solving. This is true. However, this approach comes with its own downside, it costs a lot of time. In a world where pace and agility are key to success, slow and cumbersome product development approaches eventually will lose.

Both approaches serve their purpose. But are these the right purposes? Should companies focus on owning all the possible intellectual property of a digital solution or do everything they can to move responsibility and liability to a third party? If you want to build digital products loved by its users and solving problems in the most efficient way possible, then this is probably not the right way to do it. Larger organisations are still launching inferior products, while fast-paced and lean startup companies are launching products users actually love. In a winner-takes-all era, you better shift to the right mindset and start thinking about building better products, faster.

How software vendors and agencies help keeping this rusty old boat floating.

The blame is not only on the corporate companies for having the wrong approach and mindset to digital innovation. The old school software development vendors and agencies need to choose innovation and long term growth over short term gains.

When a corporate wants to own the intellectual property of a piece of software that’s been built for them, software development companies are happy to help them out. The code that’s being written for this client will be owned by the corporate client. Great news for the CFO who wants to pump the company’s valuation.

Software development companies can’t just duplicate a codebase and sell it again when they have sold the IP to this before. However, in most cases they are able to rewrite the code when another client wants the same solution. This makes it extremely lucrative to write the same code over and over again. Just because clients wants to own the intellectual property.

You are probably thinking that this does not happen. It happens all the time. Software development companies are hired by a client to kill a repetitive task, while they write the code for this solution for the tenth time (since all previous nine clients wanted to own the IP, and so does the tenth).

The forward thinking type of old school software companies.

On the other end of the spectrum we find the “forward thinking” old school software development companies who present the business case of software licensing, providing their corporate clients with off-the-shelf solutions. Because this is what the client wants, right? I’ve seen digital projects where these companies sold their off-the-shelf solution for incredibly specific use-cases, convincing their client their solution could do it all. Result? Eighteen months in and they were still ‘tweaking’ their product via some restricted visual editor to meet the client’s demands. Not an engineer to be found in this process. The client is paying “setup” costs to set up the standardised solution to their needs that exceed the costs of building something from scratch.

Combining best of both worlds: Hybrid software development

Luckily there is a better way. Combining off-the-shelf solutions with custom built digital products. Using battle tested modules to rapidly build the backend system for your software, while using a custom approach for the frontend — building bespoke user interfaces for your users to interact with.

At Eli5 we’ve built many digital products and services for a wide range of clients — from Fortune 500 companies to promising startups. Regardless the type of company, a significant part of the intelligence we’ve built for these digital solutions is essentially similar. Nonetheless, the end-user solution and product logic can still be very different. This brought us to the idea of combining pre-built modules with bespoke development.

We’ve created highly adjustable modules that can be used as building blocks to create the backend system for a digital product or service. Adjustable enough to adapt to specific business logic, standardised enough to save a tremendous amount of time.

Focusing on what matters

With people having everything they need at the tip of their fingers, you can’t get away anymore with delivering an inferior digital product or service — even when you call it a MVP. Neither can you get away with development trajectories that are taking a year or even longer. Using pre-built backend components saves a lot of time. Time that can now be used on more important aspects of the product or service, the user experience. While we standardise components of the solution’s backend, we create fully customised user experiences on the frontend.

The trade-offs

The road to the right balance of robustness, scalability, user experience, and development speed is full of trade-offs. The best practice in a nutshell: Standardise the common parts of digital products and service, tailor these parts to the product’s logic, and fully customise its look and feel to provide a solid user experience.

The high level trade off on this model is that you as a client won’t own the intellectual property on the standardised backend modules but it does save you the time of building these yourself. The upside is that these modules are battle-tested and product development companies can easily equip them with Service Level Agreements so you don’t have to worry about a thing.

Looking at the user interface things are the other way around. If you, as a client, work with the right product development company, you should be able to make arrangements over the intellectual property. Service Level Agreements on this part of your digital product take a bit more time to create, since this part is built specifically for your product.

Growth requires sacrifice

As we are all digital innovators on both ends of the line, we all need to do our part to innovate faster and improve the output of our work. Let’s face it, corporates who don’t take risks on digital innovation will eventually die and agencies who are focussing solely on short term financial gains will too.
Corporates need to create an egalitarian environment, where ideas stand on equal footing and where we are allowed to fail forward. This beats the common corporate failure intolerant mindset every day.
As for agencies, they need to recalibrate and focus on problem solving and value creation instead of wasting time on cumbersome IP arrangements. In a lot of cases this does mean that software vendors need to hire more designers and engineers, and lay off some sales people and legal professionals.

Conclusion

Let’s focus on creating value and long term growth. Reuse those things that we need over and over again. Put extra effort into building smooth user experiences for digital products and services. And solve problems people actually care about.