In my experience, there is one single point where enterprise software takes a nose-dive into an unusable mess, and it's access control. Access control ends up b

In my experience, there is one single point where enterprise software takes a nose-dive into an unusable mess, and it's access control. Access control ends up being all of a business' BS politics encoded. You end up with "requirements" like this: * Bob can't see Sally's actions * Sally can see Bob's actions * Jim can see Bob's but not Sally's actions * Jim can't do X, unless Bob says so * Bob can't do Y, unless, Jim *and* Sally say so It's all about politics and procedure, not the actual work to be done. There's a cure to this: Make every action in the system open and accountable and let people get things done. If someone does something they aren't supposed to, then undo it and discipline them. Obviously there are some areas where (like transferring money or publishing content) where permissions are perfectly reasonable, since you don't want disgruntled employees siphoning off money or publishing disparaging remarks. But, then again, we hear about management (the super-users of enterprise software) doing that kind of damage pretty frequently, too...