Owning Your Application Take Possession

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Intellectual Property

Owning Your Application Take Possession

If you are a manager whose business relies on a website,  apps or other software in order to function,  the location and ownership of those assets (your application) is important.

As a Software, Website and App development company Matraex, Inc often comes across company managers that have built great applications and are looking to do something new with them. However,   they are unfamiliar with how they can enable us to do that.
As we attempt to gain access to their source of their application we find several scenarios which may be familiar to you:
  • The manager does not the access to the source,  and they must to request it from the original developer
  • The manager is not familiar with where the source is or which components used to make it run
  • The manager does not know how to confirm whether they have all of the information they need

In general, many client rely on  a third party to maintain possession of their Intellectual Property to be able to give us access.

For this reason I have decided to ‘propose’ a very general Intellectual Property Ownership concept that we recommend for these small business owners:
In order for your business to have true ownership of your assets,  you need to be able to “WITHOUT HELP FROM YOUR EXISTING PROVIDERS” switch your providers.
In general this could mean that you have credentials and access to every single provider or repository,  with the ability to give those credentials to a new provider.  This information could be collected, encrypted and stored by you,  or it could be spread out through out your network,  But the important things is that you have it and your business is NOT permanently beholden in any aspect to any single provider
To understand what this short statement means,  we have to define what we mean by a provider:

A provider is your current website host,  your application developer,  the vendors that provide you services.

I have a bunch of scenarios which highlight the needs a company for full ownership.

  • Any one person is hit by a bus!  – This is a favorite,   if your company is not able to get access to your application source, website, software or other assets without a one person,  you do not have possession.   Most of the time this happens when a freelancer or small company built your application,  you have confirmed that the application is working,  but you have not had it transferred to you.  You still must call your provider any time you need work.
  • If the building where our applications server blew up, we will have to rebuild – keep backups,  and make sure you can access them
  • You know you have multiple servers or components,  but you are not sure how they connect and you will need to make a couple calls to get that information.
  • Your current developer is heading out of town and you need us to talk to them to understand the application in case something happens while they are gone.

In each of these cases,   you would be able to remove these as issues if you had full knowledge of your systems.  Even better,  you had documents which you could point at,  which had all of the knowledge in them.    This is really emergency preparedness for your application.

If you need help collecting, identifying, documenting and truly owning your application,  Matraex can help you with that – 208.344.1115

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Michael Blood