Why shouldn't you develop backoffice and internal tool systems from scratch? What advantages might there be to developing them yourself? I'd like to share my experiences with the most common challenges faced during backoffice development as a programmer, as well as insights gained from meeting with clients. Additionally, I'll outline the advantages of developing backoffice yourself.
Backoffice is Essential
Backoffice have become an essential component in modern business. We need to handle various data and resources to efficiently manage and optimize business operations. Backoffice helps manage and monitor these complex processes and play a crucial role in business growth and development.
Even if you haven't developed backoffice yourself or internal tool services, you may have experience operating business with using various forms of backoffice for likes customer management or payment management.
Time is Also a Cost
However, developing these backoffice yourself requires considerable time and effort. And not all companies have abundant technical resources and staff needed to develop their own backoffice systems. To efficiently use resources, it's necessary to reduce the cost and time of building backoffice systems and focus on core business tasks.
Information Structure and Business Logic are Key
For a backoffice to function as a core tool for business success, it needs to display service information and be developed according to business logic. However, when developing from scratch, there are many considerations that require effort unrelated to implementing information structure or business logic.
To build this system, you first need to set up the infrastructure to run the backoffice. Various technical aspects need to be considered, including servers, databases, and security configurations. Additionally, frontend development is crucial in determining the user experience of the backoffice. It needs to be designed with a user-friendly UI.
However, along with these technical aspects, security and user authentication elements like permission management and login systems must also be considered. When considering all these elements, developing a backoffice isn't much different from general application development. Moreover, these tasks are time-consuming and can be particularly challenging due to the amount of repetitive work involved.
Maintenance Costs
We shouldn't overlook that backoffice needs to grow alongside business growth. Developing new application features simultaneously means adding new features to the backoffice. Additionally, existing features also need continuous maintenance and updates. The business environment constantly changes, and backoffice must change to respond to this. Backoffice plays an absolute role in feature updates, security enhancement, performance optimization, and incorporating user feedback.
Therefore, developing a backoffice isn't simply about completing initial setup, but rather a process of evolving it to match application and business growth.
External Service Integration
When developing backoffice, we often need to integrate with external services provided in various areas such as email, messaging, spreadsheets, and payments. Fortunately, most third-party applications publish APIs, allowing interaction with these services. While this greatly helps with backoffice extensibility and implementing various features, such integration work still requires significant time and effort.
Moreover, even with code you've developed before, it's common to have to write repetitive code anew when changing jobs or switching projects. Applying existing code to a new environment requires many modifications and tuning, which can cause work interruptions and waste time.
Advantages of Developing Backoffice Yourself
On the other hand, developing backoffice yourself has the following advantages:
A Playground for Backend Engineers
Backend engineers' ability to deeply understand core business and naturally integrate with their company's backend environment plays an important role in company growth and development. Since backoffice is spaces that effectively contain information structure and business logic, if backend engineers can perfectly understand this and optimize its characteristics to match their company's tech stack, companies can move in a better direction.
Backend engineers who well understand their company's core business and backend environment can contribute to achieving company goals by efficiently building backoffice and organizing information according to business requirements.
Complex Requirements
There may be situations where backoffice needs to be developed from scratch when there are unusual requirements or unique designs needed in terms of UI structure or user experience (UX). In such cases, we might find it difficult to sufficiently meet requirements with existing templates or pre-developed solutions.
One major advantage of in-house development is that we can design the UI and define the user experience as we want. We can make our apps or websites more unique by applying new ideas and creative designs.
Conclusion
Whether to develop backoffice yourself should be chosen carefully considering the team's situation, as there are advantages to each approach.
Low-code solutions like Hops offer an innovative way to efficiently create backoffice while maintaining the flexibility and creativity that come with in-house development, while largely eliminating the disadvantages of developing from scratch.
Using low-code solutions like Hops allows us to better perform core business tasks. This helps us create better products and provide better user experiences, supporting company growth.
As this article's topic was 'Why You Shouldn't Develop Backoffice From Scratch', next time I'll introduce various backoffice development methods besides using the Hops service. Thank you.
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