I suppose every industry does it, but for some reason the IT industry seems to be the worst.
In a normal company if you wanted a piece of software to do a job you would buy something off the shelf. That's too easy for us techies, we like to do it ourselves.
And in a normal financial environment, where there's a huge demand for IT Professionals charging upwards of £80 per hour, we can probably get away with that.
In today's world, however, if makes no financial sense.
Why do we reinvent the wheel? I've pondered this for many years, and I guess it comes down to pride ... techies are well known for their arrogance, tutting at incompetitent users unable to follow a simple set of logical instructions. And if I showed another IT company one of our internal systems, the chances of them saying:
"wow, that's amazing, can I buy that from you" are 0%
"that's interesting" then they go off and build something they consider "better" are 100%
Now maybe that's unfair. There certainly are more and more companies taking a view that co-operation rather than battling is the best way, but we remain in the minority.
So, let me take this opportunity to offer an Olive branch - we are good at what we do, but there's no way we know it all. We believe we have no competitors in this industry ... only potential partners.
If you drop me an email at kevin@livingstonesolutons.co.uk I'll email you back details of how you can make more money each month, provide a better service to your clients AND have more time.
Don't reinvent the wheel - it works just fine as it is.
