It’s been nearly a year since my last post and a lot of great things have happened. I last spoke about the challenges around building a packaged solution for a market accustomed to having complete flexibility to tailor software to meet unique institutional requirements. While those challenges remain, it’s worth noting that there’s a not so subtle shift in market expectations that’s starting to happen.
Throughout my career, I’ve noted that the software market really rides two different pendulums. The first is in application architecture where the pendulum swings from tightly coupled monolithic software offerings in order to deliver a consistent user experience across a wide feature set to a federated, loosely coupled model where each piece stands on it’s own but is able to interact with the other parts of the enterprise. Most days it seems that the market is in the middle trying to decide which direction to head next.
The second pendulum swings between custom applications and commercial off-the-shelf products (COTS). This pendulum often reflects the health of the economy and the size of discretionary IT budgets. With ample resources, the appeal of building custom software that exactly meets local institutional needs is strong. In these times, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that adequate budgets don’t last forever and there will be a time in the future when the budget is unable to sustain the custom software built in those good times.
We’re in those lean economic times now and this helps explain the rapid rise in popularity for packaged online applications, such as Workday and Salesforce in the broader industry. It’s been my observation that the research community is beginning to travel a similar path as well and is increasingly willing to adopt standard approaches to solutions over custom homegrown applications. Of course, success in that direction is still predicated on the ability to leverage standard settings and extension points offered by those solutions to address local institutional requirements since, no matter how similar things look on the surface, there are legitimate reasons for differentiation. This is the solution model that we now offer and continue to mature. It all started in 2012 with Click® IRB and over the past 4 years we’ve worked hard to expand the standard Research Suite into many other areas.
It takes time to move a market and deliver to such a grand vision. Our dreams will keep us busy for many years to come, but there is real momentum now. Major institutions are seeing measurable value in transforming their business to benefit from standard solutions and momentum is building. It’s both rewarding and exciting to me to see this trend and it only fuels my desire to deliver on these emerging expectations. As we look ahead to 2016, we will continue to drive on our vision of providing a robust and integrated Research Suite so that we’re ready when you are.
Cheers!
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