Hidden Costs & Delayed Value In Customized Itsm Software

Hidden Costs & Delayed Value In Customized Itsm Software

By:


This white paper participates in the growing debate around customization and configuration-why some organizations believe it is important to own a highly-customized solution in contrast to the growing majority that are rejecting customized solutions and instead implementing out-of-the-box solutions that are highly flexible and configurable to an organization's needs. This trend indicates that the ITSM software market has evolved considerably in recent years, where adoption of ITSM global standards is driving considerable process standardization that can easily be served by increasingly sophisticated pre-integrated ITSM suites. These out-of-the-box solutions deliver fast routes to value and satisfy the needs of most organizations.

In most cases, organizations that create complex, customized solutions to tightly fit business requirements at a particular moment in time, in fact, risk limiting future strategic options and often end up committed to an inflexible system that is costly to maintain. In fact, Gartner published that, "in 2006, 25% of IT spending was on unnecessary and redundant customization... This overspending is apparent in both the initial strategy and requirements stage, when redundant customization is often specified, as well as in the deployment and implementation stage, when enterprises seek highly customized implementations. This situation is unsustainable."

Recognizing that the situation above is indeed "unsustainable," organizations are shying away from customizations and instead taking advantage of increasingly robust out-of-the-box solutions. In 2008, Gartner commented on this shift, saying "a trend for IT organizations, so as to remain more flexible and have a quicker return on investment, is to perform little to no customization, run more 'out of the box' and rely more on best practice workflows and templates, rather than create their own."

Understanding the Terminology There is a lot of confusion on the semantic differences between configuration and customization. The two terms are often used interchangeably when talking about modifying an enterprise software solution to fit specific requirements. In simple terms, if a solution is configurable, the existing software can be altered (via the standard User Interface) to reflect a change in system requirements-both at the point of initial implementation and during the life of the software. Importantly, no changes to the underlying source code are required.

In contrast, if a system requirement cannot be met without altering the underlying source code footprint, the software requires customization. This involves technical skills to build the solution and often makes scoping difficult at the onset. In many cases, the services component cost becomes larger than the license costs. Typically, customizations also must be recreated if the software is upgraded to the next version, creating an ongoing reliance on technical staff and a significant increase in the total life cost of the software (usually called Total Cost of Ownership or TCO). This leads to situations in which organizations resist frequent changes to the software and thus risk decay in the value of the software as it remains static, even as processes change. The software can quickly drift out of alignment with need and typically causes an organization to enter a rip-and-replace cycle; this cycle can be difficult to break as the organization becomes convinced that it needs to customize its solutions.

What are the market trends? The broad adoption of best practice frameworks, such as ITIL and COBIT has produced a polarization of methodologies around common practices. With more and more organizations converging with regards to IT activities, the limitations of out-of-the-box solutions are diminishing. Organizations have similar needs and drivers including creating value around agility, risk, predictability and efficiency of service provision. Further, they must balance increasing service quality while managing costs. Therefore, their ITSM needs can more easily be served by a functionally-mature, out-of-the-box ITSM solution.

About the Author:
For full free article please CLICK HERE

Axios Systems was the first ITSM vendor to adopt the ITIL framework, with assyst.



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


Tags: , ,

|

Loading...
Related....
Videos...

Recent Top7-or-Top10-Tips Articles

Comments

Still can't find what you are looking for? Search for it!

Loading

Site Navigation:

Copyright 2005-2011 ArticleSnatch, LLC - All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy | Terms of Service.