Mission Tenet 1
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The needs of the social science
community are no more specialist nor complex than those of other commercial,
financial, and state institutional sectors in our societies
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The starting assumption must be that they are
best met by using industry-standard, off-the-shelf applications
that have been developed to meet the needs of those sectors,
and subjected to the rigours of market testing
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Only as a last resort should the social
science community turn to bespoke, in-house applications programming
which:
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Is expensive, in terms both of cost and
skilled resources
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Is typically opaque, rather than transparent
to further development by outsiders
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risks inflexibility and lack of potential to
meet future needs, or at worst, dependence on a monopoly supplier
institution