To deep dive into the industry I have to take you back to the history of tech in Indonesia. As you can imagine Indonesia is vast in land size and abundance of natural resources. Its island based geography actually would be prefect for adoption of technology specifically mobile technology. Which was true in the early 90’s with the boom in sms based content and ringtones “tech” businesses were pampered by high volume of digital purchases and loose privacy and billing policy allowing content providers to rake large amounts of quick returns selling all sorts of micro content on mms/sms.
On the enterprise software side there would be conglomerates and foreign System integrators alike being resellers of large ERP and Enterprise platforms such as the microsoft stack etc.
Which means that in many ways for a long time while places like India and Eastern European countries were developing both academia as well as industry level expertise and collaborations with US and Europe tech firms at the level of development and implementation. Indonesia was just a user/consumer of technology. Innovation was non existent.
Starting early 2000s however there was a move to be active in design and build part of software industry as a whole. Thus software house as we call it began to spring. Being late comers there are many easily spotted newbie signs to be aware of when picking the right partner for your software Job. Below are some of them:
1. Portfolio
Portfolio and references is hands down the best way to measure the professionalism and class of a development team. Look at not only vertical expertise but also the span of industries that the company had delivered. This shows the capability of the business analysts to understand business requirements and industry practices quickly.
2. Team Structure
Ask about how many people will be on the project. More heads are not necessarily better, ask them about the roles and types of projects the team have done together. It is a good sign if the team handled similar projects like yours.
3. Methodology
There are many ways to run projects. How are they going to manage the timeline and what project management tools will they be using? If you are technical, ask them about tech stacks, CICD etc.
