Low Fear, Maximum Impact

If you're an executive or manager in the care industry, you have been conditioned by software vendors to be fearful of building and operating your own automations and user experiences.

My experience is that the lowest pain, risk, and cost option over any five-year period is to avoid vendor technologies for this stuff and put it all in one place on free technologies hosted on zero-maintenance cloud services.

I'll explain how to do this without fear, but first I need to address the common misconception that owning your own customisations is a bad thing. Make no mistake, vendors know that you need your own customisations to avoid swivel-chair integrations and painful customer experiences - but they want your customisations on their own technologies so you pay more licence fees to them. Your initial investment implementing a finance or customer management system is just the foot in the door.

As soon as the paint is dry on your new system, companies like Microsoft and Salesforce will be knocking at the door telling you to "sweat your asset". What they'll SAY is you should get more out of your existing capital outlay by using their platform for more stuff, more solutions.

But there's no way of doing that without incurring additional licence fees. What they really MEAN is: they want you to make a much bigger investment into their proprietary technology to increase their sales and lock you in for the longer term. In a business of 1,000 people a vendor doesn't want the initial 20 people in finance and sales to be their only licences, they want all 1,000 staff to be licensed, and this is their ticket.

You can’t afford to give in to vendor self-interest. You also can’t afford to keep running your business on spreadsheets. If you have more than a hundred or so staff, you really only have two choices: you can either invest in some internally-built tech, or you can carry the cost of inefficiency, year over year, on the staffing line item of your budget.

You're convinced, right? Here's the main fear related to building and owning your own customisations.

The main question I hear from you is "how do I avoid this getting out of control?". Should these custom truffles be strewn around a variety of vendor licensed technologies or on a single free technology you control and operate?

The answer is "policy, assurance and audit".

On the policy side you need to set the standard technologies and a simple decision framework for when you will (and when you won't) build in-house integration or staff/customer app (experience). The second important area of policy addresses how to manage your initiatives to minimise waste e.g. not documenting as-is or to-be processes, governing to outcomes instead of scope and how to prioritise initiatives against each other so you know what to do first and what to do next.

These are important because regardless of whether you're insourcing or outsourcing development, the most important thing is getting the most bang for buck. I can give you a pro forma for this stuff, hit me up.

The assurance side is super important because it's where the rubber hits the road between theory and reality. The most important thing here is to pay a retainer for one of those "top talent" people I mentioned - to assure each piece of work on completion.

This person's responsibility is to ensure what's been delivered is of a good enough standard for someone else to come in and pick up and enhance with minimum fuss further down the track (and without suggesting a rewrite, which is very common). Part of this is the code itself including documentation, part of it is making sure the organisation's top-level documentation is also updated.

When I say "documentation" I mean lightweight, focused documentation. You should be able to retain someone for around $5k/mth for this during your high-change period, less if you're in maintenance mode.

There might be a way to structure this on a per-project basis too, but your management overheads for that are going to be higher. Avoid a conflict of interest here by ensuring the person doing your assurance isn't involved in delivering the work.

The final check/balance is to get a third party to audit all of this on a yearly basis. This is a different person or organisation to the assurance person.

Like any audit we're testing the implementation of policy here, including how the assurance person is performing in their role and any opportunities for continuous improvement. This is a super low-effort and low-risk way to ensure the long-term sustainability of your organisation's tech intellectual property.

You can apply this regardless of whether you're insourcing the actual work or outsourcing it - there's more on that topic to come.

Andrew Walker
Technology consulting for charities
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-walker-the-impatient-futurist/