Too Many Engineers Can Make Build Look Better Than BuyAs originally published on CMO.com

In most parts of the world, recruiting great software engineers is a serious challenge. Falling enrollments in science and math, over decades, has resulted in a significant shortfall of engineering graduates in many countries. This trend will take decades to reverse.

It might seem, then, that a surplus of engineers would be a great problem to have for most marketing managers. Well, be careful what you wish for. The fact is, too many engineers in the marketplace makes it easy for businesses to focus on tactics rather than strategy. For some companies, this means embarking on massive—and costly—do-it-yourself disasters, rather than purchasing the right marketing technology at the right time.

India is a case in point.

According to research by the Evans Data Corp., there are already 2.57 million software developers in India, and this number is growing fast, projected to be 5.2 million software developers by 2018. With so much access to in-house talent, the question I’m most commonly asked in India is: “Why should I buy software when I can just build it?”

With so many talented software engineers to choose from, it seems totally natural for IT departments to build the marketing software they need as they go.

The industry where this is particularly noticeable is the retail sector, which is far and away the most technologically advanced of Indian industries when it comes to digital marketing. In many cases, retailers have built up strong internal IT-engineering departments that have delivered passable, functional ecommerce platforms.

But when you sit down and run the numbers, building your own software just doesn’t add up—even with talented software engineers falling out of the trees.

The principal reason it doesn’t make sense is that, if you’re a retailer, software development isn’t your company’s core competency. Even if you throw all of your energy, engineers, and dollars into creating the best possible Web platform you can imagine, you’ll be directing efforts away from what you do well, and toward a gamble that may or may not pay off.

The DIY approach has other impracticalities. One of the most important ones is the time it will take for your project to catch up with the rest of the market.

Think about it this way: Even if it only takes six months for a crack team of software developers to deliver your new platform or capability, by the time it’s ready, you’ll already be significantly behind your competitors. Ecommerce in a market such as India is growing at 24 percent year-over-year, and that’s the growth you’re missing out on when it takes months to get your software live.

It’s not surprising that the finance industry is often an early adopter of enterprise software systems—they’ve done the math and know it’s not worth losing 12 months of revenue in order to DIY.

And although software developers in India are plentiful, they’re also notoriously fickle. It’s not uncommon for a team leader to switch employers midway through a project. Just imagine the delays that might cause.

These scenarios have been run and rerun in more developed markets, where IT teams now play a far more strategic role because they are less likely to be wasting their time and efforts on custom code.

And it’s not just retailers that are making this mistake. Business leaders, regardless of industry, should be using development resources to deliver the best possible customer experience. And that most often means continually optimizing, testing, and personalizing at a strategic level, rather than wasting time trying to duplicate functionality that already exists in off-the-shelf products.

This way they can put those same excellent engineers to work making changes that will create competitive advantage, rather than simply reinventing the marketing wheel. - Read more