Build Or Buy?

Background: A $750M organization with national presence has been working on a multi-year effort to consolidate the web presence of its many affiliates. The effort will help the organization to present a unified presence, increase traffic to the sites and access to services, and provide access to common content for all affiliates. The effort has been a heavy organizational lift, due largely to the political requirement to bring all of the stakeholders on board.

As the initiative moves from the conceptual and support-building stages to the planning and evaluation stage, the organization hired a consulting organization to help determine the system requirements and potential products that could meet those requirements.

The consulting company recommends several commercially available content management systems that could work, ranging in cost from roughly $75K - $250K, before customization.

The Challenge: With these in hand, the organization brings aboard a new Vice-President to lead the system building effort.

The VP's job is to make it happen. In previous projects, the VP has used a small group of developers to build point solutions, and wanted to bring that team on board to build the organizations web platform. The VP argues that this team could bring the entire system online for a total cost of $50K, with a small ongoing cost for web-hosting.

The organization accepts the Vice-President's recommendation to proceed with the small team approach. The decision largely centers on projected cost savings and the potential for quick turn-around when compared to the estimated time and cost of implementation/customization of commercial content management systems.

The Outcome: At the 1 year/$250K development cost mark, the organization decided to let the VP go. They hired a new VP, who went back to the original recommendation for a commercial CMS. The revamped system was delivered within four months, at a total estimated cost of $90K.