[radcon]

I don't disagree, but isn't it a sign of much deeper issues if this "Shadow IT" land exists at your company in the first place? Why is it that experienced programmers can't efficiently solve a problem that a business user can handle in Access?

Are they under-staffed? Neck-deep in spaghetti code? Lacking business knowledge and the opportunity to acquire it? Bottle-necked by a lack of business analysts or testers?

I hear about this too often and nobody seems to think it's a major problem. IT departments can have a queue that's 2 years deep and people don't even bat an eye, they just think "Oh, that's how IT works!" And that's not even taking into account all the requests people aren't submitting because they've given up hope of getting any dev time.

[bigger_cheese]

The problem is most of the people writing code in Access (or monstrous Excel macros or in apps like MatLab etc) are not trained programmers. I think the article sums it up well by using "power user" to describe them - technical people with no formal programming training. Think Engineers (the non software kind), Accountants, Plant Technicians these kinds of people.

In my org (I'm an Engineer at a manufacturing plant) a long time ago someone senior made the decision our company was not in business of hiring programmers so any coding is done by contractors.

So yes people have implemented things (Engineering models for example) in MatLab, or Access, or as an Excel spreadsheet etc as "prototypes" ostensibly intended to be rewritten by a real programmer. At some point these models invariably find their way into production environment and suddenly you have some kind of mission critical thing written in Access (or VB6 or Matlab or Excel).

Then IT has minor panic a contractor is given the job of trying to translate the "prototype" into "real" code and has a battle on their hands.

Often programming contractor doesn't have technical understanding of what model is doing, regardless of choice of language the code engineers write tends to look like Fortran (i.e it's essentially all math formulas), even comments probably don't help when they say stuff like "/* Ergun's formula to calc Delta P */" that doesn't mean a lot to someone without a chem eng background. I've seen contractors produce bugs by doing things like misreading a spec and adding a variable called Fe203 (i.e Fe "two hundred and three) instead of Fe2O3 (Fe "Two Oh three" - a chemical formula). You can't really blame contractor he doesn't know anything about chemistry - he was just hired to rewrite this monster in java based on a spec.

So I don't think its a simple as turning problem over to an experienced programmer and expecting success.

[amostil]

I have seen all of these symptoms at numerous large companies. The backlog is years deep and the costs associated with engaging the professional programmers could be staggering. The truth is, not all solutions need anything more robust than what Office can provide.

[flukus]

Agreed, I think it's because developers like to over engineer everything and the managers like to over engineer the processes.

So many of these access excel solutions should be a days worth of work, simple perl cgi scripts with a minimalist UI deployed by rsync. Instead we have to use our super "productive" modern frameworks, split everything into a thousand files (god forbid you embed an sql query in the only place it's called), add unit tests, etc. There's certainly times for the later approach, but most businesses need much more of the former.

So because developers don't have a reasonable platform to pinch off random little projects others step in.

[perl4ever]

"So many of these access excel solutions should be a days worth of work"

I don't know why you think a lot of VBA would be replaced by a little perl. Of course, my perspective has a lot to do with the fact that it was essentially impossible to get a new perl module installed where I used to work.

But developers often don't appreciate the importance of presentation (and other) details in reports for managers. Your reference to "a minimalist UI" is telling.

Even though Access and Excel can be buggy, unstable, and annoying, it doesn't make much sense to use anything else if you are automating a report that was previously assembled by hand in Excel, and needs to match precisely.

And often IT types like to exercise power by gatekeeping - if you aren't doing "real" programming, you don't need a Turing complete solution, so Office ends up being the only option. I've been told that if I can select a list of columns from a dataset, and some filters, by pointing and clicking, that's all I, or my managers, need for reports.

Honestly, I think a lot of people find fulfillment in their work through being the person who can say "no" to people, particularly managers that are theoretically higher ranking. And also by expressing themselves through creative decisions when others fail to specify details. I think that using Office/Access/VBA may be correlated to rejecting the value system of most developers, rather than a technical judgment.

[codeulike]

god forbid you embed an sql query in the only place it's called

-gasps-

[jotakami]

Because developing software is at least an order of magnitude easier and faster when the developer is the user?

[stblack]

This is so true.

[tabtab]

Re: Why is it that experienced programmers can't efficiently solve a problem that a business user can handle in Access?

Because existing web UI standards suck rotting ass to hell and back. The standard was not meant for CRUD and still isn't even if you add gajillion layers of (buggy) JavaScript to emulate a real GUI.

We! Need! A! Real! GUI! Standard!

[james_s_tayler]

Just master rails -g and you can be done in an afternoon.

[cc81]

Sometimes it is budget or just needing someone to drive it through a heavy process.

It is also not always worth it if you cannot show a real business case. The thing might help you and it might be worth it if you hack something together yourself but if IT is suppose to build something that is available, has support, has disaster recovery, is patched etc. it might no longer be easy to find the business case for it.

[benhurmarcel]

Exactly, to get professional IT resources you need to demonstrate a business case, go through many decision boards and budget allocations, defend it for months, and be ready to be pointed out if it doesn't reach its promises.

So in the end people hack it in Excel or Access. No need to ask permission, no budget issues, no blame if it's not great.