Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.

Melvin Conway once said:

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

I believe that encapsulates the best reason not to buy software off the shelf to run your business. Health care organizations repeatedly buy software from big vendors and repeatedly see this observation affect their own business.

The traditional way this happens is when the buyer of software sees an opportunity to change their business. Bring on a new specialty or change their scheduling practices. Predictably the software will not be able to follow the new change. So the buyer calls the vendor and asks for an update or a quick simple fix. The vendor is trapped. They can’t make the change. If they make that change they would have to distribute it to all purchasers of the software or create an individual package for the one buyer. The latter is a money loser for the vendor and the former is a public relations nightmare. The only recourse the vendor has is to put the request in as a possible feature in the next update to be released next year.

In the end the buyer is left with software that can’t adapt to their business. So they are forced to create a work around. And just as predictably the work around is a money loser.

h3o(software) delivers something completely different. The software we develop is the business’s, not h3o(software). We design the software based on your processes and practices, not the ones we think you have. When your business changes you are free to change your software at your discretion and at your pace.

Our service is to be your partner in developing your software. Not to be your vendor selling you our software. We believe the difference is dramatic.

posted by Clint 3 months ago.