Death of Bespoke?
I see an increasing trend toward Enterprise Application projects (like SAP, Seibel, MS-CRM etc.) in the profile of new work and less demand for bespoke development. I was musing on this with friends and colleagues in London last week. There was general agreement on this - we were all observing the same trend in mainland Europe, North America and the UK.
If this really is the case, it has interesting implications (IMHO) for Agile development. It is probably fair to say that Agile's biggest audience share over the last few years has been the Java/.NET community, many of whom have embraced new technologies and new working practices at the same time. A move toward ERP-type projects and would imply not only a shrinking market but also demand that Agile scale to enterprise-level issues or wither away.
Now I'm a great believer in the idea that Agile development as a phenomenon has taken too firm a hold to fade away. I detect a growing demand for agile principles to be applied in a wider context than a "mere" development project. I'll blog more on that particular topic on another occasion.
For now, I'm interested in your experiences in this area. Is anyone else observing a decline in the demand for bespoke development in favour of Enterprise packaged applications?
