I'm curious how these fellas took something like IP block allocation and turned it into an Excel based workflow.

“Workflow” is probably a bit generous to describe how they probably use Excel.

Having worked at a mom and pop ISP a couple of decades ago where we used Excel to track a lot of things, I can see how this might have happened.

To actually know who is allocated what is ultimately just a list.

And when there are only a few people who edit the list (and probably no more than 1 person at a time) you can get by with even a plain text file, but Excel is quite a bit nicer as you can do things like filtering and sorting easily, maybe even some formulas to help with things.

Building a program backed by a database might be nice, but hard to justify when the manual system has never been a problem before.

They’ve probably been thinking for a while they should, but it’s just never been enough of a pain point for them to invest the effort.

Looks like they see this incident as justification that they need a system with hard coded rules and constraints, no more manual checking.

The world's financial systems run on Excel, to a great extent.

I'm more surprised that a single person, apparently without seniority, could delete a block. IME deleting user data is usually a significant event; an IP block would especially be a big deal, especially for the IP block issuers. From the OP:

> RSD has implemented additional process controls that require a dual review for all ticketing type workflows that include a network delete.

> Only a limited set of experienced analysts are permitted to perform this function.

Great that they didn't blame the person who deleted it. ARIN seems to have put them in position where a failure was likely, eventually. Without any inside knowledge, I'd hope the culture would have any engineer leary about pressing that button without a second set of eyes reviewing it carefully and without clear authorization; I don't imagine they delete many blocks each day so it shouldn't interfere with productivity.