Abstract
This chapter addresses a difficult and controversial decision that is made every time an organization seeks a software solution to meet its needs: do we make it to our specific needs or do we buy something that is made to order but may not do everything we want? Often the build decision is called the “make” alternative and suggests that the product will be made in-house vs. the buy concept that can be referred to as outsourcing. I do not believe these simple labels are accurate or appropriate. Whether something is build or bought has little to do with whether the process is outsourced, so we need to be careful in the way we label these two alternatives.
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Notes
- 1.
The original “Big 8” consisted of the eight large accounting and management consulting firms: Coopers & Lybrand, Arthur Anderson, Touche Ross, Delloite. Haskins & Sells, Arthur Young, Price Waterhouse, Pete Marwick Mitchell and Ernst and Whinney, up until the late 1980s, when these firms began to merge. Today there are four: Price Waterhouse Coopers, Delloit & Touche, Ernst and Young, and KPMG (Pete Marwick and others).
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© 2011 Springer-Verlag London Limited
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Langer, A.M. (2011). Build vs. Buy. In: Guide to Software Development. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2300-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2300-2_3
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