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At the 2025 TECHLeadership Conference, software engineer and business analyst Isaac Smith challenged organizations to rethink how they approached technology. In his breakout session, he explored how custom software for businesses could change and improve their work.
“Is your software shaping your business or is your business shaping your software?” asked Isaac.
Identifying needs
Isaac said most technology challenges fall into three solution categories: efficiency, opportunity, and excellence. Efficiency focuses on reducing repetitive work, like entering the same data into multiple systems. Opportunity supports new services or markets, and excellence improves quality and consistency for customers.
Each challenge comes from different teams, he said. Employees often identify inefficiencies, while leadership recognizes missed opportunities. By improving workflows from every angle, businesses can identify ways to better serve customers.
Evaluating options
In his presentation, Isaac also asked, “What options are available for businesses in need of software that benefited their company as a whole?” Like cybersecurity, software needs to fulfill a need, scale with the business, and remain a low-risk investment.
The right solution needs to meet current needs, scale with the business, and adapt over time. It also needs to account for risks, including security, data ownership, and reliability. This can include a custom technology solution or a combination of solutions tailored to a business’s needs.
Off-the-shelf tools are vendor-supplied software solutions that could often meet most business needs. In one example from Isaac, a local organization found a solution that covered 90 percent of its requirements and used integration to fill the gap.
Choosing what’s right
For organizations pursuing custom development, Isaac emphasized starting with a minimum viable product. The goal is to deliver value early and refine from there. He also explained that businesses should consider security risks when choosing what is best for them.
“Vendors should have security certifications like SOC-2,” said Isaac. “Third-party audits are what you can look to. When you are looking at software, you can’t necessarily just look at the software, so you need some different mechanisms for viewing them.”
Along with security risks, data privacy also needs to be considered. Isaac said businesses should understand where vendors store their data to ensure sensitive information is not being fed into large language models.
Executing a custom build
New risks also exist with custom software, Isaac said. Penetration testing and security auditing are methods businesses can use to evaluate security. Because custom software is built for long-term use, it is important to ensure it remains secure and sustainable.
Isaac said organizations should also consider how long custom software development would take and the ongoing maintenance that would be required to address potential security vulnerabilities. Off-the-shelf software often handles this differently because vendors regularly pushed security patches and updates.
Verification and validation are the final points to consider when implementing software for your business. Isaac explained that this means ensuring the software is built correctly to achieve the desired result and that the right software will provide value for the business.
When organizations understand their needs and evaluate all their options, they make stronger decisions. This results in technology that works with the business, not against it. To watch Isaac Smith’s full breakout session and learn how to better align your software with your business goals, click here.