‘Never buy a builder’s home’ was a common admonishment I heard when I was a youngster. I probably heard it more than many because my parents actually bought a builder’s home for our family to live in when I was in high school in Auckland. The house had a few oddities, like lofts in the three kids’ bedrooms accessed by ladders, a quite indirect path to get to the common bathroom & toilet (through the dining room, then the laundry, then to the bathroom), and another loft in the garage. There was an odd mix of colours, some rough finishing on some walls, windows that were difficult to close in winter, and doors that were far too short. The previous owner had been a builder and seemed to take the approach that he could pretty much do anything building related, and used leftovers or poorly measured items to good use. Waste-not, and all that.
The same could be said about websites for IT-related organisations. These firms often resist allowing others to develop their website as they seem to believe they can do so much better themselves. Why waste money on an external provider if they have staff that can code websites in-house? And often, it shows. Badly.
I used to point to my own department’s web presence when teaching at university as an exemplar of a poorly designed website. This was, admittedly, back near to the turn of the century and the internet was largely still based on dial-up modems and other slow connections. At the time, I don’t think the department’s website was well integrated into the overall business school or wider university website. The look and feel were different for each department, and the content – brochureware as we used to call it – was very staff-oriented. Course detail seemed an afterthought. Each member of the academic staff had a profile page, complete with a huge, slow-loading, photo of the staff member. There were many other examples I saw at the time at use in the IT sector in New Zealand. I took a look at a few small- and medium- sized Australian and US-headquartered IT firms and saw similar issues – websites that seemed to have been developed inhouse by IT staff ‘because they could.’ In other words, the Not-Invented-Here syndrome at play.
Things have improved somewhat in the intervening 25 or so years, but the problem still can be found in the dark recesses of the interwebs.
I would point to the AIS (Association for Information Systems) e-Journal website (https://aisnet.org/publications/) as a current example. Of all of the academic journal websites, this is (in my opinion) the least user-friendly. Navigation is not as intuitive as other journal publisher websites. I am sure it meets the basic requirements set down by the AIS, but rather than sit under one of the far superior platforms offered by other publishers, they have to do their own thing. To me it feels like a student project. On the other hand, the ACM (Association for Computer Machinery, https://www.acm.org) demonstrates you can be an IT-oriented organisation and have a usable website. I am sure the ACM have a bigger budget that the AIS, but I am not convinced this is the reason for AIS’s poor performance.
I see the NIH syndrome turning up in lots of places in lots of companies, and not just as part of their web presence. It is an issue that befalls professionals from many disciplines. Including the consulting and advisory space (I don’t pretend to be immune to its effects). In Many cases, it stems from a belief that ‘we can do it better’ without anyone else in the business having the credentials or credibility to argue against it. It is often dressed up as pride in the capabilities of the company, the uniqueness of the company, or the need for total control of everything being kept internally.
And so companies find themselves with bespoke systems that make it difficult to improve systems. These companies are less likely to buy and integrate a more suitable system as the decision-makers have been captured by this cognitive bias and believe in their firm’s technical prowess: they can build it better, faster, cheaper. They can’t, and they don’t, and they also don’t recognise that the world has passed them by. They waste money and resources to end up locked-in to the monster of their own making.
I’ve been there. I have inherited development projects at a tech-sector firm that were meant to be game-changers. In one organisation, there were two functionally identical systems being developed in different divisions. The two divisions couldn’t agree on the core requirements, so they were allowed to go their own way. Each racked up significant cost (c. $1M each) based on totally different architectures. Both division leaders were certain they were right and had the best platform. Both failed. I had to make the decision to kill both projects. Very little could be reclaimed or reused. Both were massive write-offs.
Repeat after me: your processes are not (or certainly don’t need to be) unique. You do not need to develop large bespoke systems for your 20- or 200- or even 2,000-person company. Reject the blinkers of ‘Not-Invented-Here.’ This is not just an IT issue. It also applies to your Finance processes, your HR processes, your marketing processes, and likely many core business processes.
There is a caveat, of course. If you have developed truly unique, world beating business processes that give you a true competitive advantage that can be truly sustained, then bespoke systems and methods can make sense. But if you believe this to be absolutely true, get external advice to assess this uniqueness. Use independent advisors who have nothing else to sell you but their assessment of your business’s competitive edge.
Similarly, if you are worried that your firm is falling into the NIH syndrome, get external advice. This is the best way to overcome the cognitive biases of your inhouse ‘experts.’