Building your own LMS (learning management system) from scratch was the go-to move for many large enterprises six years ago, but with the modern, turnkey learning platforms that are available today you have to consider: is it worth it?
The answer depends on your resources and goals as an organization. Let’s compare the build vs buy options to help you decide what’s right for you.
Keeping it in-house
Building your own LMS is time and resource intensive. Companies who find success in this route have a highly skilled, dedicated development team that knows a thing or two about building out intricate systems, plus plenty of staff to support the creation and ongoing maintenance.
These are the traditional reasons companies choose to build their own:
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- Proprietary ownership: You don’t have to answer to anyone else when it comes to code. You’ll have complete ownership of your program and control over the development process, allowing you to make changes as needed without having to send feature requests to vendors.
- Customized experience: With a large design and development team at your disposal, you can customize the application however you like. This gives your company complete control over the system’s capabilities, user experience, and design.
- Adaptability: Creating your own learning platform means even though you may not get it right the first time, you’ll have the power to make little tweaks along the way to make sure everything is working as it should. What you need today may not be what you need tomorrow.
- No contracts: This one’s obvious. Not purchasing means no contract to renew — which may be the draw for many legal and finance teams. But what’s best for your legal and finance teams isn’t always what’s best for the rest of your employees when it comes to doing their best work or having the best tools at their disposal.
Choosing a tried-and-tested tool
Buying an out-of-the-box learning management tool may be the option for you if you’re looking for a cost-effective program that can be rolled out quickly with minimal time and effort from your current staff.
You’ll rest at ease knowing your learning platform is backed by a supportive team of expert developers, designers, and customer service representatives who are there to serve you.
Here’s what you get when you buy a learning platform:
- Alignment with core competencies: Most organizations are not in the business of building or maintaining a learning tool. Leave the building up to the industry experts so you can focus on what your organization does best.
- Cost savings: Purchasing is often much more cost-effective for your organization and easier to budget for. When purchasing you don’t have to hire a team to custom-build or maintain your program. Plus, you avoid some other unforeseen costs like software, support, hosting, maintenance, and bandwidth.
- Reduced time to market: Off-the-shelf solutions can be configured and implemented quickly and could save months or even years compared to a custom design and build.
- Support: Buying a learning platform from a reputable vendor means you will have access to customer service and support and answers to questions that may come up when onboarding and implementing your LMS.
- Maintenance and upgrades: When purchasing, you’ll automatically and seamlessly receive new features, bug fixes, and other updates. Choosing to partner with an innovative vendor means you are effectively “future-proofing” your system. Even if you don’t utilize all of the features on day one, you might choose to opt-in to additional functionality down the road as your program grows and matures. And you can leave the research and development up to the vendor.
- Customization done for you: Some learning solutions like Bigtincan customize the look and flow of the application to your brand and business processes so it feels homegrown without requiring the extra effort and resources.
- External resource enablement: Will you need to train third-party sellers or distributors on your products? Are you prepared to give them the keys to your home-built system? Many learning and enablement platforms are designed for this exact scenario and make it seamless to enable channel partners with the same solution you use to train your internal teams.
Other considerations
When choosing to build or buy your LMS there are a few other things to consider. Ask yourself what kind of resources you’ll need to run your program.
Staffing
Do you have the capacity to bring on more staff to help support your LMS?
The personnel needed for a purchased product may be limited to one or two people after the initial setup — just enough to create and administer the content needed for your program.
The amount of staff required to create an LMS from the ground up and maintain it in perpetuity is much different. You’ll need a long list of skilled business analysts, project managers, system architects, engineers, designers, and tech support
Features
Would you rather be the first users of a new system or deploy a stable application that has ironed out the bugs?
When you buy an LMS, you have the opportunity to find a program that is rich in quality-tested features. If resources are tight when you build, it may mean having to skimp by with a minimally viable program and slowly add on when funds are available.
Requirements
Think about what features are necessary for your organizational needs and cannot be overlooked. If you anticipate changes in the near future or have a fast-paced organization that’s constantly evolving, building your program may cause you to make frequent changes to accommodate your employees’ needs.
Registration types, courses, workflows, assessments, certificates, external integrations, and media support are just some examples of features that may require more frequent updates and alterations.
So, what’s right for you? As learning and enablement systems become more robust and mature (and at the same time more agile), fewer companies are entering into the space of creating their own. What makes sense for your business?
