5. Bespoke Software

Although specialist software might be the answer for many companies, there will be some organisations who find that it just doesn’t do exactly what they want or it doesn’t work with their current systems.

In this case, they might decide to have the software system they need designed and developed specifically for them.  This is called ‘tailor-made’ or ‘bespoke’ software.

The main advantages are:

• the company will get the exact software/system that they need
• the software will work exactly how they want it to work
• the software will only have the features that they specifically need in their business.

The main disadvantages of this approach are:

• it takes a long time to develop such a system, between a few months to  years
• it costs a great deal of money to develop such a system. 
• the company may need to employ a team of people such as business analysts, programmers, testers etc
• there will be little in the way of user support and online help