I have done some consulting for small businesses who sometimes come up against some very big decisions. I’m looking for suggestions for how to tell when making a big change (expensive in terms of time and money) is worth it. My case (hypothetical, of course): a small, privately-held, business in a very unique market niche has their own (in-house developed) software [written in a “not very popular” environment] running on a modern unix box. There is a constant need for maintenance to match changing business rules of their biggest customers. There is no “off-the-shelf” solution to run this business, or at least nothing that would not need extensive customization. The applications are currently maintained by an employee who wants to retire. The choices seem to be: find a replacement employee who knows this environment; Find a company to contract out the support; work on replacing the environment (with a very significant price attached); or something else that I’ve not though of.
The difficulties seem to include: The environment is not currently taught in colleges and is not “popular” with young IT people, which means job applicants are very experienced and “senior-level”, which means highly-paid; there seem to be few agencies willing to provide service and support of this environment (as opposed to, say, Oracle, or SAP, or some MS products); the company doesn’t apparantly have the cash available to even consider software in the US$200,000 and up price range; I’m not sure if the company would be able to survive the “trauma” of re-aligning its business practices to new software, since it has apparantly never done that (and has been “computerized” since 1979!
I’m open to suggestions of any direction and approach for this type of problem…
Thanks, —Will