In 2015 Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella famously said: “every business will be a software business”.
And it’s hard to argue that when companies like Uber, Airbnb, and JustEat are disrupting, then dominating, established, seemingly unassailable industries. If you’re under pressure to transform your company into a software business, you’re not alone. The big question then becomes: to build or not to build?
In every disrupted industry, one software trend – analytics – is separating the good from the great. Arming employees with fast access to reliable data for smart decision-making is essential for any company seeking to outflank competitors. It follows that many in-house development teams are evaluating whether to embed analytics in existing applications that people use every day, like intranets and CRM.
When Nadella made that prediction, he clearly didn’t want everyone to build their own software. Total control can be alluring, but there are many spanners that can land in the works: leadership changes, security issues, data privacy regulation, and constantly evolving technology versions, protocols, and standards – to name but a few.
The User Experience (UX)
However, one consideration trumps all others – the user experience (UX). Unless you tempt users to adopt your software by offering an exceptional UX, all the beautiful coding in the world won’t matter. And these days, with millennials dominating the workforce, people won’t be comparing your software’s UX against those of SAP or Oracle; they’ll compare it to Google, Amazon and Netflix. Modern software is built for short attention spans, and expectations for instant gratification, personalisation, and device portability.
Adoption is top priority for the many companies working to provide analytics to business users. Gartner’s 2017 report on BI and analytics pervasiveness saw adoption rates “jump” to 32% after flatlining around 20% for a decade – but remains unacceptably low. The main obstacles we see to adoption are UX issues: users can’t find exactly what they’re looking for (navigability), fast enough (speed), without IT support (self-service). Today’s the bar is higher: users want to personalise their environments, get recommendations, and use search and voice commands.
To create UXs that drive analytics adoption, companies need specialist expertise. Even if your company has the funds to invest heavily in R&D, finding and retaining ‘rock star’ quality UX designer talent is a bun fight. With a global skills shortage in UX design, LinkedIn has cited UX design as one of the top skills to learn in 2020 analysing the data from 660+ million professionals and 20+ million jobs.
Buy vs Build
As with most things the buy vs build decision all boils down to what your goals are. If the software you need is really specialised, not available on the market, and has few external dependencies, building makes sense. However, if your goal is widespread user adoption of a service like analytics that supports digital transformation, then buy – or a hybrid approach where you can do custom development with an SDK – are the ways forward.
A note of caution: what often starts as a project purely to solve a specific problem can morph into something much more complex.
So, the question shouldn’t be ‘can we build it?’ but rather ‘can we build – and maintain – software that people will use’?
R&D Tax Credits
If the answer to this question is yes, and you are committing yourself to a significant R&D programme, then another important question should be – Is your current R&D Tax Credits provider capable of ensuring you optimise your claims?
MSC R&D are Software R&D Tax Credit specialists – with three PhDs in Computer Science, the guy who wrote the rule book, and hundreds of satisfied innovative software based clients.
The bigger and more complex the claim, the more we like it.
Why not call us on 0114 230 8401
(main article ref: Kevin Hurd, Digital Hive)
