Alert software is becoming increasingly popular with businesses and organizations around the world looking to improve internal communication and share information quickly and easily with their employees.

It provides a dedicated communications channel where messages can be sent to phones, smartphones and tablets, bypassing other channels such as email, and it is more reliable than intranet or social media platform to ensure that all those who need receive an alert message receive it. . Alert software can be used to communicate almost anything you need to with employees, from emergency alert notifications to IT outages, reminders about important corporate events, CEO announcements, education and training information, and much more.

There are many desktop notification software systems on the market with similar features, and with a little research you should be able to locate a ready-made solution so that it can be directly installed and used, or make modifications to suit your needs. specific to your environment. Some organizations, however, take a third route with IT alert software: That is, they decide to build their own alert software.

It may sound like a good idea, but it can actually be a very expensive decision and may not lead to the result you are looking for. If the project is unsuccessful, you may end up reverting to an established desktop alert software If you or your IT department are tempted to go the route of building your own alert software in-house, here are some important factors to consider:

1. Do you need a custom software option?

 Ready-to-use software solutions are readily available and purchasing a wish to your organization to achieve the goal of sending internal alert notifications quickly and easily.

Many organizations find that the one-size-fits-all approach cannot meet their specific needs.

Are there capabilities your organization needs that aren’t available elsewhere? And are these basic functions necessary for the successful use of an alert solution in your company? Or are they just “nice to have” features? The answers to these questions should help you make the right decision.

2. How much is it going to cost you?

Building software will cut off a team of your IT employees from other tasks they might be performing.

They will need to spend a lot of time determining the scope of the product to ensure that it is suitable for the purpose of their organization. Then time will be spent coding the software, testing it, fixing bugs, and finally implementing the software and checking for more problems.

You could waste months of these employees’ time for this process to occur, time for which you will still be paying their wages.

3. Do you have the right equipment for this task?

Unless your company is a real software development company, your IT department may not have the right skills to develop a custom alert system for your company.

Many people make the mistake of assuming that all information technology professionals can perform any task that falls within that occupation. But the reality is that the people who solve IT problems in your organization are probably not also software architects, software developers, or application developers.

Some may review and learn, but that is a process that takes time and also trial and error when creating software for the first time. Or there is the option of hiring staff with software development skills and experience and teaming up to create your custom software.

So now, in addition to salary costs, you will also have to pay to train your existing staff or have hiring costs to find employees who can do this specific niche job.

Depending on where you are in the world, the cost of employing a team with these skills could exceed a million US dollars.

4. Have you considered your ongoing support needs?

When you purchase third-party software, you will generally have access to help and support for a period of time, even indefinitely, depending on the type of software license you have.

When there are known bugs with the software, these companies fix the bugs and release updates to ensure that customers can use the software smoothly and without interruption.

Software vendors have specially trained staff on their teams to help their customers solve a variety of ad for known issues and respond to any others that may arise.

When developing software in-house, who will be responsible for these tasks? Will you still need to use a software development team to fix bugs? Will your regular IT help desk staff be able to offer product support?

If you need to make more customizations or modifications in the future, how are you going to achieve it? For example, if your organization uses other software and you would like to integrate it with your alerting software through the API, will you be able to do so?

Conclusion

There is a saying that you can save time by not “reinventing the wheel” and quite possibly that is what you would do if you committed significant internal resources to developing and delivering an internal software solution.

It can be easy to get sucked into the excitement of building a new custom platform from scratch, but the total cost of such a project and how much it will take from your business results may not be worth it unless you have a clear need, which aligns with business objectives and will help you achieve successful results.