Software development

Software Development (School) This paper will address two different questions in regards to software development. The first question addressed is in regards to the best strategy for developing software. The second topic addressed is in regards to IT governance as it relates to organizational investments in the field of information technology. At the end of this paper, both questions should be answered in full.
Keywords: software development, strategies, IT, governance
Software Development
Question 1: Software development can be a considerable part of a company’s software budget. Software may be developed in house or outsourced. Outsourced development may be onshore or offshore. There have been heated debates on the best strategy of developing software. Take a strategic position on this debate. Create an argument for which method (in-house, onshore, or offshore software development) is the best in terms of cost, security, reliability, and intellectual property protection. Support your response.
In-house software development is the best choice in terms of cost, security, reliability and intellectual property protection for a company. By developing the software in-house, you are ensuring that you are using your own people, people who are already familiar with the company, how it works, what needs changing, and more importantly, how the software needs to work in order for the employees to do their job. This also ensures that there are no security leaks, that the company itself is able to see every step of the way what is being done, which allows for directional changes to be made quicker than if another company has to create something and then submit it for review, and it ensures that no other companies are able to take your ideas and use them as their own, ensuring the intellectual property rights of the company itself. Studies have shown that outsourcing brings with it “ cultural barriers, expertise transfer difficulties and communication and coordination overhead. … (It) is riskier and more challenging that collocated development” (Bird, Devanbu, Gall & Murphy, 2009).
Question 2: IT governance is concerned with organizational investments in IT and to ensure that the IT strategy delivers full value. The avoidance or prevention of IT strategic failures is the biggest part of IT governance. Describe two issues that drive IT governance.
IT governance is driven by the quality of the internal structure of the system, and the cost of the system itself. “ The malfunction of a key IT system sometimes leads to heavy financial losses,” (Bart & Turel, 2010), and as such, IT governance must strive to ensure that those key IT systems do not malfunction. Secondly, IT governance is “ defined as the structures, processes, and relational mechanisms for the IT decision making in an organization (Simonsson & Ekstedt, 2010); consequently the quality of the governance system works to ensure that malfunctions do not occur. The quality works to ensure that there are no issues that arise which may result in financial loss, and it is the possibility of financial loss that ensures that the quality is present.
Works Cited
Bart, C., & Turel, O. (2010). IT and the Board of Directors: An Empirical Investigation into the ” Governance Questions” Canadian Board Members Ask about IT. Journal Of Information Systems, 24(2), 147-172. doi: 10. 2308/jis. 2010. 24. 2. 147
Bird, C., Nagappan, N., Devanbu, P., Gall, H., & Murphy, B. (2009). Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality? An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista. Communications Of The ACM, 52(8), 85-93.
Simonsson, M., Johnson, P., & Ekstedt, M. (2010). The Effect of IT Governance Maturity on IT Governance Performance. Information Systems Management, 27(1), 10-24. doi: 10. 1080/10580530903455106