Counterpoint: if a small part of the process is getting tweaked, how responsive can the team responsible for these apps be? That’s the killer feature of spreadsheets for business processes: the accountants can change the accounting spreadsheets, the shipping and receiving people can change theirs, and there’s no team in the way to act as a bottleneck.

That’s also the reason that so-called “Shadow IT” exists. Teams will do whatever they need to do to get their jobs done, whether or not IT is going to be helpful in that effort.

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chasd00 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

i've seen many attempts to turn a widely used spreadsheet into a webapp. Eventually, it becomes an attempt to re-implement spreadsheets. The first time something changes and the user says "well in Excel i would just do this..." the dev team is off chasing existing features of excel for eternity and the users are pissed because it takes so long and is buggy, meanwhile, excel is right there ready and waiting.

	▲	thingortwo 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I always see this point mentioned in "App VS Spreadsheet" but no one gives a concrete example. The whole point of using a "purpose" build app is to give some structure and consistency to the problem. If people are replicating spreadsheet feature then they needed "excel" to begin with since that is a purpose built tool for generalizing a lot of problems. It's like I can say well my notebook and pen is already in front of me, I can use this why would I ever bother opening an app? well because the app provides some additional value.

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LPisGood 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I have never heard of shadow IT. What is that?

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analog31 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's when the users start taking care of IT issues themselves. Maybe the name comes from the Shadow Cabinet in England?

Where it might not be obvious is that IT in this context is not just pulling wires and approving tickets, but is "information technology" in the broader sense of using computers to solve problems. This could mean creating custom apps, databases, etc. A huge amount of this goes on in most businesses. Solutions can range from trivial to massive and mission-critical.

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rcxdude 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the term is mainly just because it tends not to be very visible/legible to the organization as a whole (and that's probably the main risk of it: either someone leaves and a whole section of the IT infrastructure collapses, or someone sets up something horrifically insecure and the company gets pwned). Especially because most IT departments hate it so there's a strong incentive to keep it quiet (I personally think IT organizations should consider shadow IT a failing of themselves and seek out ways to collaborate with those setting it up or figure out what is lacking in the service they provide to the rest of the company that means they get passed over).

	▲	analog31 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's quite possible. I've done a certain amount of it myself. A couple of programs that I wrote for the factory 15+ years ago are being used continually for critical adjustment and testing of subassemblies. All told it's a few thousand lines of Visual Basic. Not "clean code" but carefully documented with a complete theory of operation that could be used as a spec for a professionally written version. My view is that it's not a failing, any more than "software development can't be estimated" is, but a fact of life. Every complex organization faces the dilemma of big versus little projects, and ends up having to draw the line somewhere. It makes the most sense for the business, and for developer careers, to focus on the biggest, most visible projects. The little projects get conducted in shadow mode. Perhaps a benefit of Excel is a kind of social compromise, where it signals that you're not trying to do IT work, and IT accepts that it's not threatening. There's a risk, but I think it's minimal. Risk is probability times impact, measured in dollars. The biggest risks come from the biggest projects, just because the potential impact is big. Virtually all of the project failures that threaten businesses come from big projects that are carried out by good engineers using all of the proper methods.

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_puk 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's where you have processes etc set up to manage your IT infra, but these very processes often make it impossible / too time consuming to use anything.

The team that needs it ends up managing things itself without central IT support (or visibility, or security etc..)

Think being given a locked down laptop and no admin access. Either get IT to give you admin access or buy another laptop that isn't visible to IT and let's you install whatever you need to get your job done.

The latter is often quicker and easier.