Outsourcing Dilemma: The Search for Competitiveness, The

The packaged software solution to performance problems

In both North America and Europe, a few major companies are still using bespoke systems that were first installed in the 1970s or even earlier and have been added to and updated ever since. Most organizations, however, prefer to buy packaged solutions to control their main business functions. For them any significant improvements in the packaged systems available are welcome if their availability coincides with a previously perceived need to change systems, and unwelcome if what is now accepted as an inferior system has just been implemented.

In the late 1970s the software vendors and consultancies dealing in financial systems software often described their product as ’good for five years ...