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by F_J_H 1845 days ago
Yes this happens...sometimes. And, other times, (as reflected in comments ITT), there are many cases where a low-code solution built by a non-dev have brought huge benefit. (I've seen this myself - see below - MS Access apps that saved hours and hours of work, but which IT had not time to look at.) I've also seen the sentiment in your comment lead to an outright ban by IT dept. of all low-code tools, for no other reason than the "slippery slope fallacy" that "if we allow this, we could potentially have a big mess to sort out one day". And in doing so, summarily kill a ton of innovation and productivity.

One anecdote I remember - a regulatory change created a major issue for a billing department. They went to IT to get their help to address it, and were told "sorry, no time to even talk to you right now. Come back in six months. Actually, make that 8 months." So, a tech. savvy person in the billing dept. built something in MS Access that solved the problem. They were thrilled. When IT heard about it, they tried to get the guy fired. Billing Dept. manager had to go to bat to make sure that didn't happen.

1 comments

My counter, and anecdote, to this is the IT Dept recation is not so much a "slippery slope fallacy" but rather a reaction to past actual experiences

it is ironic that you bring up Access because that is one the tools I despise the most, our helpdesk is routinely indated with requests from people that pass around Access Databases with custom data links either to Excel files, or ODBC connections that are not standard but rather customized by the "power user" that created the database, then they share the database and it generates all kind of errors that the non-power user can not fix so IT gets roped into spending our time fixing not only users system to establish the needed data links, but also moving things around and reconstructing the databases so it actually works in way that is shareable

The IT Dept has also spent countless hours correcting Access Database connection issues, and schema issues when we move servers, upgrade platforms, or do anything on the prod system that end up breaking the Excel and Access "Low Code Applications" that consume data from these services because the end user lacks the technical ability to fix them often because they were created years ago by people that have left the company or retired.

Sure it's work. But is it really more work than developing an entire new system from scratch? Because that is incredibly labor intensive, if not one of the most expensive endeavors in IT you can undertake imho. It's easy to think IT will create the perfect system that has no support issues but TBH there will probably be just as many.
So you'd ban MS Access? Why do people use it as opposed to an "IT Sanctioned" tool? If you IT dept does not have time to provide the tools people need to do their jobs, and you take away one of their tools, what/who fills the productivity gap?