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Citizen developers in an organization are not a bad thing. But it is important to properly support them, with the right tools and training, but especially when
by sixdimensional 7y ago
Citizen developers in an organization are not a bad thing. But it is important to properly support them, with the right tools and training, but especially when the harder problems need to be addressed by specialists.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoI second the "right training" part. I think any organization working with any kind of data should invest in making all their office employees Excel power users. Wrt. right tools, I think Excel is the right tool. It may lack safety affordances, but it does its job cheaply and efficiently (and you already paid for it since you probably need to open Word documents anyway). As for "harder problems addressed by specialists" part, it happens, but I'd argue not that often. Are they using Excel to half-ass CFD sims of their rocket engine nozzles? Sure, they probably could use a proper software for that. Are they doing their own specific munging of customer or process data? Their workflow is probably too specific and too fluid for it to be shoehorned into a "serious" application without a tremendous loss of productivity.