Is Customization a Boon or Bane?
One of the biggest challenges for
an enterprise today is to constantly upgrade and optimize their IT
infrastructure to cope up with the fast growing technology and never ending
business demands. As the IT consumers have to transform their heavily
customized old school enterprise applications to a standard technology
platform, the Enterprise application developers and the Companies are having a
stand of between customized application and a configurable solution.
Today's enterprise solutions like
SAP, BAAN, Oracle, IBM Packages, INFOR etc., see a major challenge in the
upgrading to allow more configurations possible. As customized solution
delivered to one business client may or may not be a requirement for another
client in the similar line of business and more to come. They need to work
continuously to meet the market demand.
It is very much certain that
companies are following are strict no-no policy for customizations, what makes
these business and software consulting agencies to go for configurations and alternative
solutions to an extent even compromising business requirements at times? What
makes them to be very cautious to go with the customization? To get to know the
outcome of the customization one must understand the various degrees of the
customization and its impacts.
There are several factors which play on the
minds of the companies that need and deliver the IT solutions in using
customization as an option. Though, as
an example, by adding single line of code could make the GUI of the application
to be more user-friendly or remove the unnecessary functions which are not
required for that organization; Most of them believe that the customization
bring more trouble than a good as it will continue to grow.

2. Skills
of the resources have to be upgraded to break and fit the packaged solution of
ERP / CRM / EAM etc.
3. Lot
of testing efforts are needed to bring the confidence on the piece of code that
has been customized
4. After
any Enterprise application upgrade, a good amount of time has to be spent to
ensure that customized piece of code is holding good.
A Positive Dimension on Customization
Even with many positives in going
with Configuration approach, it presents its own set of challenges, as more and
more configurations are built into the application, a company needs more highly
trained skills to ensure the delivery what has been asked for.
Even with these shortcomings
carried by the customization from the configuration, at situations vendors
& Clients are forced to go with the customization. Could I get any benefits
out of this? Answer is yes. At some of the instances customizations are
inevitable either to fit the business requirements to standard / Industry best
practices or to standardize a new process.
In certain occasions
customizations are used to render the brand image of the vendor going to an
extent to completely form a new skin over the packaged solution, following
nonstandard integration frameworks etc., and bring a new level of user
experience. It always provides an edge over the standard package
implementation.
Conclusion - What is the winning Key?
Winning combination knows the
limit and level to which a customization can be applied over enterprise
solutions and the integrated components. The lower the customizations are the
higher the reliability of the system and lesser the break down or maintenance
cost. But, one can conclude that configurations alone cannot help them to
compete with the today's business demands and they have to strike a good
balance with the customization need. Companies that follow a very strict
discipline and standard guidelines can fly high even with the customizations as
part of their systems.