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Enterprise Applications: Customization Vs. Configuration
One way businesses are coping with the challenge of upgrading and optimizing enterprise apps is to avoid customization. But configuration options present challenges of their own.
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We've been asking InformationWeek readers about their attitudes toward enterprise applications since 2010, and over the years we've seen remarkably consistent responses to certain questions. One area that's an ongoing source of pain is changing, upgrading, or optimizing existing applications. That was by far the top barrier to success in application and process management cited by respondents to our 2012 Enterprise Applications Survey, and those results were much the same in our 2011 and 2010 polls. These tasks were also cited as the most time-consuming ones respondents face, and here, too, results were nearly identical in 2011 and 2010.
One way businesses are coping with the challenge of upgrading and optimizing enterprise applications is to avoid customization. For their part, vendors are providing more options to configure applications for particular needs and industries. But in some cases, configuration options are getting so numerous and layered that they present challenges of their own
The difference between customization and configuration boils down to coding and development versus a vendor-supplied menu- or wizard-driven approach. When you develop custom code to change or extend functionality, there's always a chance the code won't work when the vendor introduces the next release, so extra validation steps are required. In the case of ...
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