[hiharryhere]

I used to work at JPMorgan. We had an official acronym for these tools... UDTs, or User Developed Tools.

They initially started when ops teams were told a custom report for a client would be too expensive/slow to build properly by tech, so they would DIY a report in excel.

These started to get out of hand, and after a few years they numbered in thousands and had evolved from excel sheets with macros into full fledged Access DBs with ODBC connections into our data warehouse. A specialist team was created in Ops to build and support ever more complex UDTs, they were called the UDT Team.

Problem was that these were poorly documented and often done without consultation with Tech, so we would unknowingly break loads of downstream stuff whenever we embarked on new projects of our own.

Fun times. Plenty of stories.