Information Technology Division Executive Office for Administration and Finance COTS Commercial-Off-the-Shelf Software solutions – An Overview

10/24/20152 What is COTS? Commercial-Off-The-Shelf software is prebuilt software that can be customized to meet your business needs. The expected benefits: Applications are provided at a reduced cost. Increased reliability. Standardized documentation Improved quality due to rigorous testing Improved process efficiencies as business expertise is built into the solution Compressed delivery schedule as focus is on customizations and configuration COTS is an alternative to custom built solutions which are designed and developed from scratch based on business requirements and software development processes. COTS Solution Custom Code Config Files VS New Code

10/24/20153 Case Study Overview: EOHHS HIE Orion Health HIE provided core components that allowed phase 1 of the project to finish in under 6 months from procurement to go-live

10/24/20154 What do I lose? COTS Journal – February 2008 Most importantly, you lose the ability to provide software that matches your business process exactly. If you are re-engineering or starting from scratch that is not a problem, but if you have existing business processes you want to keep as is, COTS is probably not for you.

10/24/20155 Conclusion If you are resistant to process change - You should only pursue COTS solutions for smaller scale projects the introduction of new functionality Otherwise, you should actively pursue COTS solutions One final note of warning – COTS solutions should require minimal coding beyond expected new functionality. When evaluating COTS products, lengthy development times should lead you to question the overall COTS-ness of the solution. Some vendors label themselves as COTS but are really software architectures that improve development time, but still require extensive development. These solutions may be right for you, but do not expect the benefits of COTS identified previously.