Lower life-cycle costs by taking advantage of the more readily available and up-to-date commercial industrial base. Concerns However, regardless of the extent to which a system is made up of commercial items, the Program Manager PM and Systems Engineer still develop, integrate, test, evaluate, deliver, sustain and manage the overall system. The vendors can embed proprietary functions into COTS products, limiting supply sources. Vendors do not have to provide design information and often restrict purchasers from reverse engineering their intellectual property.
Supply chain risk management of COTS items is limited by the vendor, who is under no obligation to the purchaser to provide such information. Incorporating COTS products places constraints on the rest of the design and reduces trade space; functionality, interfaces and reliability and maintainability characteristics are embedded in the choice of a COTS system element.
Another point is COTS software is usually very reliable. Developers of COTS components conduct research into the most common types of business processes or problems solving techniques and compress them into software packages that can be used across the board.
Inexpensive examples, like word processing or tax return software are easy to find and purchase from retail stores. An electronic copy of the instructions is also usually included on the disc that contains the installation files and resources and in several languages to boot. Even though companies can make do with freeware or open source software, it is often a requirement on their part to ensure that majority of the applications they rely on are COTS products. This is because, other than having installation instructions, most of the COTS applications have a customer care section that aids any organization that has bought their product.
In these cases, agencies could end up shouldering the cost of nonstandard or outdated practices, or technical debt that comes from using obscure COTS products. If the same COTS solution is successfully in use elsewhere in government successful according to the users, not according to the vendor.
A quick internet search can usually indicate if this product is in production or has led to failure for example, had serious cost and time overruns, led to a lawsuit, or had major configuration challenges. They may be able to flag potential concerns around customization or modification expenses.
If you can see early on that the COTS solutions will require a lot of modifications or customization to meet your user needs. Configuring a COTS product to meet your needs is not inherently a problem, but we often see modifications to the underlying code base grow to the point where the system cannot handle any updates from the COTS provider.
This poses security risks and can be a risk to the long-term viability of the tool. Be sure to verify that any customization and modification to meet your user needs will be less costly than an open-source solution. On the other hand, if the COTS product already meets your user needs, does it come at the cost of having to support a suite of features that your organization will never use?
Large COTS platforms that are the Swiss Army knife of solutions can leave your agency paying for large licensing costs to support unused capabilities or features you will never use. COTS providers will often have a disincentive to be transparent about the maintenance costs of modification and may charge additional costs for migrating existing data or extracting data when a contract sunsets. You can mitigate this risk by procuring the smallest possible solution or multiple smaller COTS products and leveraging open-source components that fulfill discrete tasks so that you are less reliant on any one single component.
Government services to the public are often unique and distinct from private sector offerings. Therefore, if a private company offers a product to manage a government service, it was likely developed to be sold to multiple government entities, making use of decentralized government purchasing. This can have advantages, but agencies can also be susceptible to vendor lock-in. The out-of-the-box solution requires expert guidance to fully implement and utilize.
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Ad Hoc Analyzer is focused on simplifying the process of creating and editing reports and queries. Many organizations cannot afford the staffing and expertise to develop in-house solutions or buy custom solutions COTS vendors spread their development costs across all customers who purchase their software, which allows them to invest in continuous improvements.
Feature capabilities and usability that individual businesses cannot always afford. Features you might not know you need are included. Software is more reliable because more users typically means a more mature system, with less likely to have surprise bugs that lead to implementation issues.
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