But some of the weary techies I’ve worked with (particularly middle-management types, for some reason) go off the deep end.  I like to say that when you encounter a technical challenge – there’s likely someone else who has also needed to solve a similar problem.  In the instances where that isn’t the case – you’re in a pretty good position to gain something from solving it yourself.  But truth be told, there are very few large problems out there that people aren’t solving.  And yet IT organizations continue to re-invent the wheel – even when economics and time tell them that they should look for an off-the-shelf solution.  This only leaves one real driver for making the build decision when the buy decision is so apparent: politics.  And often it’s the politics of the grudge.

I firmly believe that every shop I’ve walked into that has rolled their own MVC framework, or RIA framework, or rules framework contains an individual who truly believes that the cost of supporting, maintaining, and continuously developing that software is still less than the cost of taking a turnkey solution – either one that is commercial or open source.  I recently had a manager tell me that there was an increasing drive through the IT management structure that the enterprise should own the source and rights to all of the systems that it supports.  This was a crazy notion – are their boundaries to this doctrine?  Will we be writing our own application servers?  RDBMS?  Messaging systems?  Where does this cult draw the line?  And with a little more digging, and without much surprise – I found that this manager had spearheaded a campaign to adopt a particular Javascript framework for client development that ultimately failed and cost the company several millions of dollars.  His dogma seemed crazy, and it was. But it was completely motivated out of fear that technology selection, no matter where the accountability lay – was an avoidable cost of enterprise IT, even if it meant adopting the more extensive cost of building all solutions from the ground up whenever the need arose.

I guess the moral of the story is really that as an IT manager, it’s important to recognize the power of the crowd (the community if you will) and the value it can add at virtually no cost to your organization.  That it’s important to understand why a 3rd party tool has been selected.  That it’s general limitations are known early on.  That your organization is prepared to adopt the tool as if it were it’s very own.  This means hiring experts who have used those technologies.  And above and beyond anything else, that when you fail – the goal must be to marginalize the cost of that failure.  You can hedge your bets, you can reduce risk.  But when the dust settles and a selected technology has failed the organization – be sure to take a good hard look in the mirror and be open about where the selection process has failed.

Sometimes it is the captain, and not the ship.