Many companies have had specialists write home-grown code. It was was written long ago and has been in use for some time. Although limited, perhaps out of date, it is installed and working, and probably doesn’t cost anything. But what are some considerations?
- What functionality are you missing and how important are those features?
- How many are using the home-grown code (getting reports)? Should other people be using it and if so, why aren’t they using it?
- Can anyone support the code? Are there bugs? What is the risk of not having someone around to maintain the code?
- When was the last update? Is there any documentation? If so, is the documentation up to date?
- What are the Opportunity costs of having someone work on this code, vs. doing other things more important? We assume maintaining license monitoring code is not why they were hired. We assume there are important projects they could be working on.
- Are you realizing the greatest possible benefit, like saving the most possible, like fully understanding usage patterns an dependencies? If not, what are you missing?