[Duff]

If you say that, you don't know anything about Access.

Access is a veritable swiss army knife for non-computer people. A smart business user can do all sorts of things in an afternoon that normally require a programmer a few days to get done.

Example: My wife is a financial person whose employer doesn't have $350k to create custom reports in whatever Oracle nighmare her billing and finance system is implemented in. She can, however, export some data and do the reporting/analysis that she needs to get her job done.

The new versions are super-powerful. If your employer publishes lots of list content on SharePoint, you can treat the lists as a sort of database table in Access, and do lots of ad-hoc reporting with a tool that is right there on your PC anyway.

That said, Access gets evil when some dope decides to implement some critical application for a global company on his PC.

[goombastic]

This is nothing. I had a director tell me he wants to port all of 300K contacts and 2M call records and other CRM records to excel. Yes, excel.

Today the sales reporting for the company runs off of excel sheets, hundreds of them and reconciliation is a mess. Once the reports are made, he wants it copied to powerpoint slides. People are particular about the color of the text boxes. This report has to be sent out weekly. No one reads a thing. This is a very very large MNC I am talking about. A company that employs over 70k people and makes money suggesting things like strategy and IT vision to other firms. It's appalling.

I got a terrible year end rating anyway and I was told I talk too much technology. I missed a raise and got a reduced bonus all for a bunch of monkeys in pants.

[baconner]

Yep. That's exactly the kind of diasterous shadow system I'm talking about and a good example of how the issue is cultural as much as technical. It'd be tremendously difficult to keep all those spreadsheets telling the truth all the time. You're almost lucky nobody reads them because who knows what kind of poor decisions would get made from such a mess.

[baconner]

To be fair its been years since I've touched access so maybe its much better now than it was. Also perhaps I'm blaming the paintbrush when I should also be blaming the painter which is going on regarding PowerPoint in this thread.

That said I've had to unscrew a number of spaghetti coded access based shadow systems of the "why are you running your business on this!?" type in the past and I do think these tools are to an extent responsible for leading users into the wrong paths. PowerPoint for instance guides users right into bullet point hell. You can create beautiful presentations with it but it leads you in the wrong direction from the start.

The danger of access (and excel) IMO is they encourage users who don't regularly build software to create complex systems without good tools to test and verify what they're doing and in a totally disconnected fashion. They also lack an audit trail which enables all sorts of I'll advised and sometimes unethical number fudging. Generally speaking I consider numbers out of these systems suspect until I understand how they work. as long as they're simple its manageable but they get complex quickly with no control and no record of how they got the data to a given state. This disconnection bears similar risks as a developer who goes for months without checking in code only to drop their masterpiece in on code cut day and inevitably shoot everyone in the foot.

I sympathize with people whose choice is between building a shadow system and having to deal with a Oracle's billing department (shudder). I just think there can be better solutions between "user is totally at the mercy of n thousand $/hr report writing consultants" and "user is forced to code their own disconnected data system without a net." In that situation I'd probably be recommending option #2 as well but with a please KISS warning.

Every time I read about a company making a big public mistake because they made an error in a user developed shadow system it breaks my heart a little.

I suppose its as much or more of a company culture and procedural issue than it is a tooling issue but the tools we make are responsible in some part. I think we can do better without throwing user empowerment completely out the window or spending big money to get a simple report. I think this is the most important ongoing challange in business intelligence (despite how cool "big data" is at the moment).