Closely Held Applications

Computerworld - Imagine if you wrote and maintained every major application in your enterprise. The good news is that you wouldn't have to wait for vendors to fix integration problems before making application upgrades. The bad news is that when application conflicts arose, fixing them would be entirely your problem. And as your infrastructure changed from, say, client/server to three-tier to service-oriented architecture (SOA), you would need to migrate everything yourself.

That's the situation at Crutchfield Corp., a Charlottesville, Va.-based catalog and online merchant of consumer electronics. The company has a staff of 500 people, with some 550 desktops and 100 servers to manage. And the IT organization wrote 85% of the code that runs inside the company, according to CIO Steve Weiskircher. His staff maintains 300 applications that run on Windows servers. Those applications include the Web site, warehouse management, point-of-sale, general ledger and order entry systems. The order entry system alone has more than 1 million lines of code.

With that many applications to manage, it's not surprising that Crutchfield has a relatively large IT staff for its size, including 18 full-time developers. But why take on the burden? "It's due to our entrepreneurial nature," Weiskircher says. "We know our business and data better than anyone else." By making the investment, he says, Crutchfield is able to achieve a level of business responsiveness that enterprise application software vendors routinely promise but never seem to deliver.

The advantage of owning the code is that the IT staff can make changes quickly instead of waiting on vendors' revision schedules and priorities. "That does come at a cost when you have things like Windows XP SP2 or any other change to the infrastructure," Weiskircher says. Those types of changes cause the same problems for Crutchfield's homegrown applications that they cause for commercial applications.

Steve Weiskircher, CIO of Crutchfield Corp.

There are times when Crutchfield does look for outside help. A decision to move to Windows XP Service Pack 2, which was precipitated by the spyware battle that call center staffers faced while working on the Web, was delayed when Crutchfield discovered that its own applications were accessing areas of the registry and file system that SP2 was trying to close. With only four people available to manage the desktops, Weiskircher estimates that it would have taken six months to identify all of the application conflicts and track down the problems. "We didn't know everything that had changed since SP2, so we would have had to look for lots of variables," he says.