Neglected opportunities
Let’s fix small issues first before embarking on large ambitious projects
Let’s fix small issues first before embarking on large ambitious projects
After doing consulting for a number of years, I reached the conclusion that many, if not most medium to large organizations typically have a large body of home-grown half-baked ‘solutions’ that are giving them headaches.
Those home-grown ‘solutions’ mostly consist of some linked spreadsheets, or sometimes Microsoft Access apps. To understand the problem better, let’s first look into why do such half-baked applications come into existence? After interviewing a lot of staff, here are my findings:
Many non-technical people express their frustrations with the IT (internal or provided by the business partners). They refer to the IT as “Ivory Tower”. They depend on IT to automate the manual chores that are error-prone and are not scalable. But IT is giving them hard time.
One VP of sales was complaining to me: “Any time I come to IT to ask for help, it’s always ‘pee in this cup’ or ‘pee in that cup’. They are always giving us the runaround!” Obviously, the pent-up frustrations are forcing people to reach for alternative solutions.
Desperate situations require desperate measures, so people reach for help outside of IT. They bring in their own ‘experts’ (maybe a nephew fresh out of college?) & ask them to help automate some chores. Or, maybe they try to do it themselves. A lot of non-tech people like Excel.
What happens next is non-tech people smuggle some half-baked Excel spreadsheets or MS Access apps into the org & start using them for running their business. I’ve seen a multi-billion $ energy corp running the core of their business on a truckload of linked spreadsheets!
Why is that a problem? Well, spreadsheets were not designed to withstand any serious traffic/processing. They are convenient utilities that are useful for smallish standalone automation. Used for real life processing, they quickly outgrow their utility.
And yet, they’re everywhere. And they are more often than not crumbling. Given sufficient pressure (and it doesn’t take much), such cobbled up ‘apps’ start misbehaving. People desperately try to patch them up, but to no avail. This is where the story becomes interesting…
I find that people are desperate to fix this situation. They are eager to get real tech experts take charge, rewrite those brittle spreadsheet into a well-engineered networked system. I can’t remember how many times I was asked to please jump in and do the rewrite. Meanwhile, teams of software creators are too busy to even look at that because they are building new solutions and large scale systems.
Any time I do it (rewrite some failing home-grown app onto a well-engineered platform), people view me as a savior. And it usually doesn’t take too long to get everything back on tracks. Also, while doing the rewrite I always take the opportunity to collaborate with the ‘victims’ & improve the functionality & the UX. People simply love that.
Why am I discussing this? Firstly, it’s typically what I’d call low hanging fruit/big bang for the buck. Instead of getting mired into multi-year large enterprise system implementation (that has slim chances of succeeding), I’d much rather help my fellow coworkers.
Chances of successfully rewriting some crappy Excel spreadsheet apps are infinitely larger than the chances of successfully implementing ambitious, over-engineered ‘enterprise’ system. And if we do our rewrite properly, it will be easy to integrate various rewritten systems.
So, the punchline of this article is that there is an unexplored, uncharted territory awaiting our help. Millions of poorly engineered ‘duct tape & chewing gum’ apps are in desperate need of rescuing. Let’s do our clients a favour and help them get out of that swamp.