For many years I was the contractor that came in to work with the Subject Matter Experts (SME) using Excel and Access, bypassing the IT department. My role was

For many years I was the contractor that came in to work with the Subject Matter Experts (SME) using Excel and Access, bypassing the IT department. My role was to review with each user their Excel and Access usage and make sure that we could make life simpler for them. If this meant automating some process they did with Excel then that's what I did. Pharma company - took the manual Excel process and automated the living daylights out of it so that what the departing analyst took days to do would now be done in minutes. Petrochemical company - took the reports being done in Excel by a petroleum engineer (each taking 2 hours to do each) and automated to allow him to do the reporting for 50 client companies in under a minute. Whether Excel or Access, these tools will be used by the SMEs and nothing any IT department does will change this. What IT needs to do, is make sure that the models used are accurate and that the spreadsheets and databases are correct. Most people who use either Excel or Access make interesting blunders in their creations and end up basing decisions on incorrect output from their creations. It takes an experienced and clue-in developer (IT person) to speak with and then analyse the creations to make sure they actually match what is required. For those of us who do this kind of work, we must understand that the SMEs are those trying to use Excel and Access and that we are there to help them achieve the SME's desired outcome. The SME's need to understand that they are NOT SME's when it comes to Excel and Access, which most seem to never get this point.