Non-IT Companies understand that IT is not their core business. Yet IT is an (if not the most) important part of the daily operations and often has become a single point-of-failure. Nowadays we see that these institutions contract out their IT development activities to specialized IT companies.
These IT companies either deliver off-the-shelf software that is adapted to the needs of the client or actually create tailor made solutions. With adapted off-the-shelf software, the number of changes to the core often becomes that big that we can almost speak of tailor made software.
In both situations the communication between the two organisations is tremendously important; without a well organised user/developer relationship the chance of delivering the right applications is low. As we know from experience, it is hard to define all the user needs and business requirements upfront. A solution for the communication issue can be to apply agile development; key users from the client participate in the development by the supplier. However in general the financial institutions do not work agile; they apply well planned releases in which applications tested against functional and non-functional specifications are integrated with other internal or external systems. In fact we can see a switch from agile to linear software development as soon as the software is handed over to the client. In this presentation I will elaborate on this phenomenon and will give suggestions on how to deal with it