[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.