Your learning and development team have determined that none of the LMS solutions evaluated will meet the needs of your organisation. So you now have to pick the best of the bunch and make a decision to either customise it or integrate it with solutions that provide the missing bits. This article looks at what's involved in those choices and offers suggestions.
Customisation can be expensive, open ended and risky. Integration can offer best-of-breed products at off-the-shelf prices, but how well do they integrate, and what does it cost to integrate?
Let's say you need an LMS that offers custom workflows, enabling you to auto-schedule classrooms, send expiry reminders, course documents, outlook appointments and notify trainers of scheduling changes. For whatever reason, the LMS you chose has great features but doesn't include custom workflows. Now you need to make a choice: do you get the LMS vendor or licensed developer to customise the LMS for you, or do you purchase a software subscription that provides great custom workflows and get an experienced developer to integrate it.
Let's assume we mean effective integration, not the kind that forces your admin team to work two systems, perform spreadsheet acrobatics and double handle student data. An effective integration is seamless, reliable and transparent. Your people shouldn't even know that two systems are involved.
After looking at the price, ROI and risks associated with customisation you decide to integrate MS Office 365, making full use of MS Flow, a highly programmable workflow designer. Later we'll explain why integration in this case was a far better choice.
In this approach you'd work with the vendor or licensed developer to modify the off-the-shelf product to cater to the training and assessment needs of your business. The steps might include:
One important point to raise here. Customisation and Configuration are not the same thing. Configuration gives you, the customer the ability to make changes to the products options and behaviour. While configuration is built-in flexibility included in the off-the-shelf product, customisation is not pre-planned. It requires the software vendor or a licensed developer to make changes.
In this approach you'd research existing software that provides the functionality and services that will address the gaps in your LMS, ensure that the software has the necessary capabilities, and employ a developer to implement it. The steps in this approach might include:
Both options can potentially address any shortcomings in your off-the-shelf LMS, but it's important to choose the right tool for the job, employ good skills and be involved and diligent in acceptance testing and sign-off.
Customisation is a good option if the changes are small and easy to implement, or the requirement is so specific that no 3rd party software can feasibly address your functional gaps. Another possibility might be that you absolutely must retain ownership of the source code, though that is a rare requirement these days.
But in most cases, and particularly for larger projects you'd get better results by integrating an established 3rd party application.
Good software today is designed to communicate and share data with other software products. Customisation is becoming less and less important and in many cases, not available as an option. The decision usually comes down to scope and price. So get quotes for both options, and decide whether the list of benefits above are important to you. Look at what software you already have, and ask the experts whether integration is feasible.