“To Build or Buy: That is the Question”

Co-authored by Craig Henderson, President of 3D-L.

We are straying from our usual data related blog posts to write about a question that often comes up as organizations look to PolicyMap to help with their data and mapping infrastructure. It’s familiar in many worlds – “Is it better to build a system yourself or buy a solution from a vendor?” While every department, organization or company situation is unique, there are several key advantages to using a cloud-based, online application, like PolicyMap:

Save Money: First and foremost, licensing an existing, road-tested product like PolicyMap costs a lot less than trying to build, host, maintain, fix and update it yourself. You leverage the expertise we’ve gained in servicing hundreds of clients who are successfully using our online application.

Save Time: Second, you can access PolicyMap – or provide access to others – overnight. The product is already widely in use, and all we need to do is “turn on” your permissions.

Use Your Team for More Interesting Work: Third – and this one is perhaps the most important in our opinion – you can use your staff time that would be spent building a similar tool for other mission critical work, where they’re not duplicating an existing application. They can also spend their time analyzing data rather than collecting it, and exploring other valuable datasets that your organization needs to do its work.

Leverage Other Data in the Platform: Fourth – and this one is also very critical in our minds – we load data for customers all over the nation and have a team dedicated to finding, cleaning and loading new and wide-ranging datasets. You leverage all of that data in your own work, as it’s fed directly into the application. For instance, you don’t need to find the resources to keep updated transit stops, tax data, education attainment, home sale stats, mortgage data etc. in your own platform. We do that for you.

Piggyback on the Demands of Others: Fifth, we hear from customers everyday about additional tools they need or features they’d like us to improve and we roll these improvements into the platform. Demand from our users is what drives our platform enhancements, such as the Analytics tool, the initial data loader, improved printing, new ways to build custom regions and more. As a PolicyMap customer, you benefit from these improvements at no additional cost.

No Maintenance, Hosting or Uptime Worries: Sixth, as a customer, you are licensing a platform that is someone else’s job to worry about. We address the maintenance, pay for the hosting and make sure the platform is running as quickly as it can.

Stay Ahead of the Technology: Finally, we have a team whose singular purpose is PolicyMap. As a result, we stay abreast of all new technologies that can make our platform faster, more interactive, mobile, more connected, more real time. It is our business to do that. As an organization with your own business goals, why would you want to take these challenges on too?

All good stuff to keep in mind as you think through your online data and mapping needs. As always, call with any questions! (866) 923-MAPS or info@policymap.com