It’s fair to say that somewhere in any digital agency’s business plan is a paragraph about the importance of owning code. This is fine for agencies like Special Moves who see themselves a pure production facility. For traditional digital agencies like Agency.com or AKQA who want to provide strategy and creative ideas this is a BAD idea.
1. As soon as you own a bit of code, you want to start reflogging it to other customers. Not only is this is lazy, but nearly always unstrategic. You’re selling them someone else’s answer.
2. Focussing on solutions you have already created makes it harder to be innovative. Are you really going to do something on mobile when you’ve got a bunch of web developers sitting downstairs with nothing to do?
3. You will start to become platform dependent - look at the number of traditional digital agencies with big wads of Flash developers. Guess what their answer to a brief is going to be.
4. That previous code bank will be out of date within a year anyway.
In the world of branding and marketing, new ideas, new thinking and new approaches are the most important things. Don’t let a bunch of legacy stuff hold you back.
Grow expertise not code!
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Tim Malbon 29 Feb 2008
ReportI would add to this the unacceptable risk of relying on agency software. What happens when they go out of business? Thankfully, I was gone by the time Interesource blew up, but the clients whose sites were created using our dev framework and hosted in our building were not so lucky. They were faced with some pretty tough decisions and steep bills from the company who took over. Read about it here: http://blog.jameshiggs.com/2008/01/09/telegraph-interesource-and-the-future/
On the other hand, a dev team equipped with the right tools (tools they know inside out) can do a better job for a better price in less time.
I think the dynamic changes with the size of the company. Some small specialists we know have developed some really cool software because they can’t get it elsewhere, and it gives them a real edge. Others are basically caught in the trap of having to flog old technology just to keep their developers in work. The tail wagging the dog, I always thought.
Stuart Eccles 29 Feb 2008
ReportOut of date in a year… try 6 months!!.
Additionally there is a strong chance that the code an agency develops will be no better than that available in the open source market, which is frequently better documented, innovated on more often and with a larger available developer base. This applies to any agency that have ever built there own CMS!!
Like Tim though, I don’t think this means that agencies shouldn’t do development. They should only do it, if they can do it at the right value and excel at it. Frequently the best concept, strategy and creative companies are poor executers.
There are some companies that produce good reusable code but this is very much at a framework level and the best ones release this as open source anyhow, such New Bamboo Code and ThoughtWorks Opensource
Code is never the IP you think it is. Check out Dave Thomas’ Keynote at RailsConf Europe