James Mills is a web developer in the North East of England and founder of Refresh Teesside »
Mike Hughes is the Head of Business for the Evening Gazette. He will be blogging on all matters of importance to Teesside businesses - and some that are just worth knowing »
Jez Davison, business writer at the Evening Gazette, is a regular blogger on all things business - particularly finance, entrepreneurship and the state of the Teesside economy » 
Karen McLauchlan is the Evening Gazette's deputy business and features editor - with special interest in all things industry, property and arts related » 
Jeremy Middleton is a venture capitalist and the co-founder of FTSE-200 company HomeServe » 
Deloitte, which has 23 offices across the UK including Newcastle, is among the country's leading professional services firms » 
ClimateNE & Climate Change Schools Project support the move to a low-carbon, resilient economy and help businesses avoid risk and realise commercial opportunities. Posts by Jen Atkinson, Krista McKinzey and Harriet Thew » I have never been a fan of bespoke software or of having a single employee who has developed your systems and they become indispensible by default and remind you of it at every opportunity!
Bespoke or custom written systems seem to be forever work in progress and development can carry on for years until you generally decide that an out of the box solution can do it. Out of the box solutions will often be able to provide 90% of what you need and with some tweaking you can get close to the rest. CRM is a great example of this. We are fans of Act by Sage and although seen as sales tools, MC Ware in Stokesley, North Yorkshire have implemented this product into all kinds of applications from manufacturing to domestic violence centres.
So it may surprise you to know that I am one of the partners behind www.stayinthegoodbooks.com a custom written, bespoke online greetings card site that allows you to send real cards to people in the post via the internet. The site is launched and doing well but it has been 12 months in the making and I have to report that the reason that these projects take so long is because of people like me changing my mind - there I have said it. It is impossible once you see what a system can do not to ask for a little bit more. The developers will say "here is the card reminders program you asked for, it even selects a birthday or anniversary card for you at random just as you asked for" to which I reply "that's great but is it also possible to actually suggest a message inside the card". Other requests that were not in the original spec included, uploading of your photo's to the front of the card, upload hand written messages and signatures, I'm sure you get the idea.
So in future I shall be more patient with the developers and the guy in logistics who has written a program that links into the postal system.
I will sign off now as whilst writing this I have an idea about integrating stayinthegoodbooks.com with Facebook, I wonder if they have taken the lock off the door!
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