Vendor as IT Role Model

"…some pioneering companies have found a way to capture the benefits of packaged software in a customized-applications environment. They have adopted the approach of software vendors …"

--McKinsey & Company

Just after I blogged about how vendors should champion the cause of their IT customers, the spring edition of the McKinsey Quarterly published an article that says leading companies are already using vendors as role models … well, sort of. The article is titled "The Next Generation of In-house Software Development," written by Sam Marwaha, Ranjit Tinaikar and Samir Patil.

The basic gist is this: that companies can speed development, reduce lifecycle costs, and enhance their areas of strategic differentiation by essentailly creating an in-house vendor of commonly used software building blocks to serve particlar user "markets." The authors call these market-focused applications "archtypes."

Here's an example:

"All 'road warrior' applications … need tools that support offline work, the offline-online synchronization of data, PDA form factors, and early-morning and late-evening technical assistance. Companies essentially need to standardize these processes into products, designed once and then used over and over again for different applications, within a particular archetype."

This is a trend vendors should get behind. As the article states, some technologies, like SOA, lend themselves naturally to making application components more reusable. Another is enterprise decision management (EDM), as noted by James Taylor in his blog post on this same McKinsey article. (I leave it to James to explain why.)

The point I want to make is that here's a perfect example of where vendors can help their IT brethren promote a business case and thereby strengthen both IT's position and their own.