Build your own software, yes, build it
Over the years libraries have searched for software solutions to satisfy their needs. With the advent of open-source solutions suddenly we have great flexibility in the customizations that we can do to existing software products to fit our needs. But, have we gone too far? Are we making organizational decisions based on existing software tools rather than evaluating our needs and building solutions around them? Building your own solution is not cheap, but neither is adapting an existing open-source solution. There are many advantages when building your own tool: your organization gets exactly what it needs, knows the code inside out, the architecture that supports it, and the organizational decisions behind it. Software maintenance on a known codebase is simpler than on a codebase that you inherited. What about the complexity of the code? A tool that does one specific thing for your organization is simpler than one that does many things that you might not need. This session will cover pros and cons when deciding whether to build our own tool vs adopting an existing one, as well as the long-term considerations of creating and maintaining software systems that drive critical areas of our organizations.
