Every company has at least one person who can fix any issue with a minimal cost, jury-rigged solution. These fixes are necessary and often urgent. Those doing the budget repairs deserve praise for their financial stewardship of a business’s resources, but there quickly comes a time when bare-bones solutions start costing more than “real” fixes. This holds true for a business’s IT systems and processes.
I’ve historically been the person that advocates for doing and building all of the IT solutions ourselves. As someone who has spent most of my career in healthcare IT, the organizations I have worked for have been very cost sensitive as healthcare is not a high-margin field. As an IT Specialist at Kinetic Edge Physical Therapy in Pella, I advocated (and built) a variety of solutions housed for no additional cost within our Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
In the end, I realized that a few key factors necessarily limited the success of my minimal-cost, self-designed solutions:
- DIY is great for custom solutions but terrible for compliance
- DIY is great for quick solutions but poor for long-term reliability
- DIY is great for solo practice but scales poorly with company growth
- DIY is great within a unified tech stack but integrates poorly in a varied tech ecosystem
DIY and Compliance
The first and arguably most important caveat within DIY IT is the compliance factor, especially when the DIY solution touches any sensitive information (passwords, financial data, patient information, etc.). Because a necessary component of compliance and security is determining who is accessing what and when, it is necessary for those privileged users to be logged into any information retrieval system with their own credentials. Tracking user movements and actions via access management is not always easy even with professional software and often near-impossible with DIY IT. An example from my career is a canvas-style Microsoft Power App I designed for athletic trainers at Kinetic Edge Physical Therapy for sports medicine documentation. It was designed to be simple and easy to use, but the ability to have a defensible documentation platform simply wasn’t there (at least not with the time and expertise I had). Building a robust auditing capability would be essential, and giving users delineated access would have required a revamp of the database. In the end, I simply could not justify the cost of developing this myself rather than changing course to integrated with the new Electronic Health Record system that we were adopting.
DIY and Long-Term Reliability
An inherent danger of building solutions yourself or delegating that to skilled employees is that you or those employees will eventually no longer be with your company, and their expertise that built and maintained that system disappears. If it’s a standardized solution (like maintaining an Excel sheet with formulas), the skills to maintain that solution will probably be easily replaceable, but if your solution is a custom Power App or a Python program, you’re going to have to shell out to get talent that can understand the solution or simply give up and find a new solution. At that point, one of the concerns simply becomes retrieving the data from the existing solution!
DIY and Company Growth
Small business owners often thrive in a startup culture and enjoy the agility and freedom to make needed changes quickly to adapt to market pressures. The solutions they give themselves can be turned around quickly to meet new needs. This is not so when your company is 50 or 100 people who depend on a solution every day. When your time-tracing system is a unique Excel spreadsheet for every employee that is then linked to a master Excel spreadsheet, you’re at risk of formula errors corrupting the whole data flow, and you add work for yourself every time something needs changed. Want to calculate PTO differently for your employees? You’ll need to update all 100 Excel sheets’ formulas. If you have manpower who have the time, this is fine, but there comes a point were the time saved via automation of manual processes is worth more than the cost of the solution.
DIY and Your Ecosystem
Say that you’re a big Microsoft fan and love keeping your tech stack as consolidated as possible. I’ve been there, and I get it. I needed an internal IT service desk for my employer and went the DIY route, creating a SharePoint Lists database integrated with Forms and Power Automate. It was a fine solution that did its job, but I started running into limitations as soon as I couldn’t connect my 3rd party IT asset management, remote control, and knowledge base solutions, resulting in wasted context switching with each service ticket (and mismatches between data sources). I finally realized that our varied tech ecosystem required solutions with more native integrations. Thus, I ended up switching to a software solution typically used by Managed Service Providers to centralize the entire ticketing, IT asset, remote access, and knowledge system.
When Saving Costs You More
All this is to say that DIY in tech solutions typically has its place in limited uses where system integration and compliance are not primary considerations. Your current and future employees will thank you when they are spending less time deconstructing a DIY solution and putting that effort into executing established process with a reliable vendor. Next time you’re considering a DIY tech solution, ask yourself what the consequences will be if it spontaneously goes kaput in five years, who will fix it, and how long it will take to fix. If you can live with the answer, then the DIY route is probably okay for you!