Packaged software: implications of the differences from custom approaches to software development

This paper contributes to the literature on software development in two ways. First, by discussing the packaged software domain relative to the more commonly studied custom IS domain. Second, in this paper presents I speculate on the implications of these differences between packaged and custom IS development. Regarding the first issue, while the two domains share many commonalities, the differences are also important to understand. To make this clear I discuss the differences at four levels: industry forces, approaches to software development, work culture and development team efforts. At each level, data from three case studies are used to illustrate the differences between the two domains. To frame the speculation, I contend that the differences between packaged software and the traditional, custom, approach to information systems development will be profound for five stakeholder groups: software development organizations, software development teams, software developers, software consumers and for researchers interested in software development.