Step 4 · Market Research and Build vs. Buy

Research approaches before choosing vendors. Determine whether the problem requires a commercial product, an existing system you already own, an internal tool, a process change, or a combination.

Full guide planned · 12 min read
Step 4 · Market Research and Build vs. Buy

The short version

Compare approaches before you compare vendors. For an inventory problem that might mean commercial platforms, RFID, barcode or QR workflows, a module in software you already pay for, a process change, or a small internal tool. AI-assisted development has made some internal tools dramatically easier and less expensive to build — that does not mean every system should be built internally. Weigh support, cybersecurity, data sensitivity, maintenance, integration, operational criticality and long-term ownership. Sometimes the right answer is buy. Sometimes it is build. Sometimes it is hybrid.

See it applied

Worked example — built from published USFA sources, not from a department's reported results

Worked Case Study: The NERIS Transition Through the Technology Adoption Roadmap

Every fire department reporting incident data had to move from NFIRS to NERIS on a national timetable. The destination was fixed; almost everything else was still a local decision. This works the twelve steps through that transition, using published U.S. Fire Administration material for the facts and clearly labelled examples for everything a department would do locally.

Read it

Go deeper

Hub guideNext in Fire Tech 101

Run the Demo

Step 5 of the roadmap.

Questions to ask your vendor

  1. Does something we already own do most of this?
  2. Would a process change solve enough of the problem to wait?
  3. Can we build this ourselves, and should we?
  4. Who maintains it in three years if we build it?
  5. How sensitive is the data involved?
  6. How badly does it hurt if this system is unavailable during an incident?

This is a reading list, not a guide

Everything above was published by someone else, and is here because it is the clearest treatment of the subject we could find and verify. The Hub’s own guide to this topic is still being written. If you know a better source than the ones listed, that is worth telling us before it is.

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