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> As I said in my comments above, it's a question of who owns the data. In general, other than things like financial information and HR records, IT does not own

> As I said in my comments above, it's a question of who owns the data. In general, other than things like financial information and HR records, IT does not own the data in our company. They provide lots of services (version control, Jira boards, etc). They often are responsible for backing them up at a specified interval (daily, etc). And they are responsible for configuring them to be secure (which may involve shutting off APIs). But they don't own whether someone can write a script to automate clicking on fields, etc. I don't understand what that means. With noted exceptions, nobody owns specific data in any of the many companies where I've worked or consulted. You own data stores, get restricted access to other data stores... that's services, even if it's SOA/P. Standard for many many years. > If IT was responsible for every database, Jira board, etc in the company beyond their regular backup, little work would be done. It's a huge company, and we cannot have one org be a bottleneck. Not sure what this has to do with the situation at hand, where a user who was a part of a human data entry team dealing with metrics around oil rigs and live oil pipeline data decided to automate their data entry dayjob. No data stores or backups were touched beyond their contribution. > No one has answered my question that I brought up several times: If I can write my own program to do it, should they ban compilers as well? I'm sorry but whatever damage a VB script can do can also be done by C#. Should we ban Visual Studio? I don't understand your insistence that a language is meaningful. Why would the IT guy sign off on a haskell program, or a java program, or a python or awk or bash pipeline? He doesn't have the expertise to verify that it does what your job is to do. He doesn't know the guy's job, doesn't see testing, can't verify if it's right or not. With no verification of correctness, he's completely right to block it, no? I almost feel like I'm missing something here. Sure, my employer allows me to run whatever I want on my laptop. They don't let me pump piles of data into prod environments from that laptop even if it's done in AHK, F#, ... whatever. Why would they? That's a crazy requirement to have. If you have over 50k employees and each person is allowed to script prod data, let me know the name and some prod endpoints for your company. I'll give you a hundred bucks on the spot :)

BeetleB 6y ago
> Not sure what this has to do with the situation at hand, where a user who was a part of a human data entry team dealing with metrics around oil rigs and live oil pipeline data decided to automate their data entry dayjob. You keep bringing up the oil fields, oil pipeline, etc. The original commented did not indicate that this is the purpose, and nor did he indicate the importance of said data, or the cost of the loss. I think I have an idea to what he is referring to, and the data is not that critically important. If it has some importance, there will be a paper trail. As another commenter said, they either have a process to audit the validity of data entry or they don't. Whether it was hand entered or automated is irrelevant. Throughout this thread you've been arguing from extremes, invoking cases where such a thing could be disastrous, etc and using that as a general purpose argument. No one is saying there aren't occasions where IT should not interfere - I've acknowledged that there are cases where they should. There's nothing to indicate that the original commenters use case is one of those. And this is what people in the thread are caring about: Someone who has no idea about the problem interfering with a perfectly fine methodology. I could go on and address your other points in this and other comments, but I don't want to discuss this with someone who doesn't seem to understand the problem domain at all.

BeetleB 6y ago

> Not sure what this has to do with the situation at hand, where a user who was a part of a human data entry team dealing with metrics around oil rigs and live oil pipeline data decided to automate their data entry dayjob. You keep bringing up the oil fields, oil pipeline, etc. The original commented did not indicate that this is the purpose, and nor did he indicate the importance of said data, or the cost of the loss. I think I have an idea to what he is referring to, and the data is not that critically important. If it has some importance, there will be a paper trail. As another commenter said, they either have a process to audit the validity of data entry or they don't. Whether it was hand entered or automated is irrelevant. Throughout this thread you've been arguing from extremes, invoking cases where such a thing could be disastrous, etc and using that as a general purpose argument. No one is saying there aren't occasions where IT should not interfere - I've acknowledged that there are cases where they should. There's nothing to indicate that the original commenters use case is one of those. And this is what people in the thread are caring about: Someone who has no idea about the problem interfering with a perfectly fine methodology. I could go on and address your other points in this and other comments, but I don't want to discuss this with someone who doesn't seem to understand the problem domain at all.