Comments on: How to really screw up a “Buy or Build” decision

By: Mr Angry

Mr Angry — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 02:38:08 +0000

Rick: I’m not a techie Feel free to describe the difference (seriously) I was just using my ill-informed layman’s description.

By: Rick

Rick — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 01:24:50 +0000

Uhmmm… the AS/400 is not a mainframe….

By: Mr Angry

Mr Angry — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 22:48:02 +0000

That’s OK Ron, I know I was joking and Mike was as well in his original post. I took the side of programmers this time because I thought I’d been picking on them too much lately I think I need to address the issue of communication between IT, users and management – it’s a real “root issue” of problems that spill out in all sorts of ways.

If the needs of each party aren’t being met fairly of course people go for work-arounds. I probably should have also pointed out that the workplace I was using as an example in this case was by far the most dysfunctional place I have ever had the misfortune to be trapped in. The strategy you are describing seems eminently sensible – I hope it goes well for you.

By: Ron Porter

Ron Porter — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 22:12:37 +0000

I know you were talking about Excel VBA apps, but I let my own anger get the better of me. I’m frankly tired of my colleagues’ “solution”: ban Excel and Access. Why not put some resources into training, guidance, and support for Excel and Access? Sure, we only have 1 or 2 people outside of IT that should have Access and maybe a couple of dozen that should do serious Excel work, but I’m amazed at how little it takes to keep these folks on the straight and narrow. They don’t do VBA and nothing goes live without IT inspection.

We’ve only just started down that road, so it’s impossible to declare either success or failure, but we are quite confident that we won’t destroy ourselves as a result. Early results (6 months) are encouraging.

By: Mr Angry

Mr Angry — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 22:31:25 +0000

I’m not sure I made clear what people were actually doing in Excel… They weren’t using it as it was intended (learning how to use pivot tables can be incredibly valuable), they were building VB APPLICATIONS in it. Excel is nowhere near robust enough to handle this reliably and they ended up making their own lives a misery when their apps crashed and they lost all their data.

I did make a point of acknowledging their frustration with a system that moved at a glacial pace but making bad decisions regarding workarounds creates a worse situation, not a better one. And doing work that’s supposed to be distributed across the company on a custom application that exists only on your hard drive is not exactly efficient or trustworthy.

The problem of users not having resources to do their work effectively is a different and important one. The problem of a totally unresponsive and arrogant IT department is also a serious one. But if you attempt to deal with this by making bad decisions that result in incompatible applications and data structures (which is what happens if people develop custome apps in isolation) then you become part of the problem and you actually end up further away from having a real and lasting solution.

It’s like scratching an itch too hard – it feels really good at the time but will cause you pain down the line.

By: Maliha

Maliha — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 17:03:30 +0000

Salamaat,
yet another example of the madness in the IT industry…at first i didn’t agree with oliver; but on second thought he does have a point. Short of locking users out completely, i guess IT-ers would have to suck it up and deal with the occasional/not so occasional catastrophes they create.

meh.

By: Ron Porter

Ron Porter — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 15:49:51 +0000

I have a tendency to agree with Oliver regarding Excel and, as I’m sure you could guess, would extend that sentiment to Access, I think that there are other issues. When IT doesn’t have the resources to do all the work, then the users need to do something other than wallpaper their offices with sticky notes. What would you have them do? Sure, the stuff can turn out to be absolutely horrid, but at least you have a functional spec and data in a format that has enough structure to be importable to a real system.

What we’ve done where I work is to give *every* user Excel training. Now they know that every spreadsheet *starts* with a raw list of unsummarized data suitable for use with a Pivot Table. Yes, we actually spent the hour it takes to teach someone to build and use a Pivot Table. Along the way, I’ve managed to convince most of them to call me before they start so that I can give them a bit of advice. I’ve identified a few candidates for some training in basic database theory and practice and hope to teach them to use Access, if not wisely, at least not dangerously. The idea is to build an information systems pipeline that starts with people solving their own problems in maintainable ways (Excel), goes through some clean-up and refinement and getting wider distribution (Access), and finally makes it to me for final application development and integration (currently C# on SQL Server).

It’ll only take a few years to find out whether this works for us and there’s no way it can be as bad as what has been going on for the last decade or so.

But to move back to the topic at hand, I whole-heartedly agree with the other stuff. Escpecially the bit about thinking first.

By: Oliver Townshend

Oliver Townshend — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 11:18:42 +0000

Yet another diss on Excel, a reliable application that actually works and that the average user can understand (as opposed to Access, or “open source”). A good consultant would have told them that it was a good prototype, or even better fixed the problems, and then used it as a basis for a proper application.

This is the kind of attitude that IT used to have and caused Lotus 123 to take off, because users were able to develop stuff that IT wouldn’t. Going full circle I expect, lock down the PC and close out the users and then get in shock when they do things on their own.