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Though I have seen user-developed software used the right way, I've also seen what you've described. Aside from the concerns you raise, there also a tendency f

by tyingq 5y ago

Though I have seen user-developed software used the right way, I've also seen what you've described. Aside from the concerns you raise, there also a tendency for information to get siloed. Different areas of the business start hoarding data. And people start using the same term to describe different things, etc. The incentive to share and use common definitions is often lost.

claytonjy 5y ago
As someone who hasn't seen user-developed software built the right way, I'm very curious to know what enabled such an outcome. What processes or infrastructure helped prevent the situation described in the parent comment?
- tyingq 5y ago
  I imagine there's other ways to do it, but the biggest difference was a sort of centralized visibility and watching the user-developed stuff as it evolved. Then interceding politely to get anything off fixed. Linking like tables, identifying who the authoritative source is, changing field names, providing some sort of discovery of what exists, pointing out data privacy issues, etc. Basically making sure there's a caretaker, and that they try to help and guide versus lock down and dictate, where practical.
  - claytonjy 5y ago
    Is that "a" caretaker, or a team? From your first paragraph it sounds like an awful lot of oversight, to where this sort of "user developed software" is rather different in spirit from what we're generally describing with that term. Excel would lead to far fewer problems if you had a centralized "spreadsheet unification and QA" team overseeing all the spreadsheets...but then you'd see people opting out of that in order to move quickly, and the problem repeats itself.
    - tyingq 5y ago
      >Is that "a" caretaker, or a team? Like anything else, the team size would vary, based on workload. As for Excel, it doesn't lend itself well to centralization. Lots of spreadsheets would float around on local drives, email, wouldn't have any simple inbuilt way to determine who is using them, how often, if they even exist, if they were ever going to be shared with more than one person, and so on.

by tyingq 5y ago

claytonjy 5y ago

As someone who hasn't seen user-developed software built the right way, I'm very curious to know what enabled such an outcome. What processes or infrastructure helped prevent the situation described in the parent comment?

tyingq 5y ago
I imagine there's other ways to do it, but the biggest difference was a sort of centralized visibility and watching the user-developed stuff as it evolved. Then interceding politely to get anything off fixed. Linking like tables, identifying who the authoritative source is, changing field names, providing some sort of discovery of what exists, pointing out data privacy issues, etc. Basically making sure there's a caretaker, and that they try to help and guide versus lock down and dictate, where practical.
- claytonjy 5y ago
  Is that "a" caretaker, or a team? From your first paragraph it sounds like an awful lot of oversight, to where this sort of "user developed software" is rather different in spirit from what we're generally describing with that term. Excel would lead to far fewer problems if you had a centralized "spreadsheet unification and QA" team overseeing all the spreadsheets...but then you'd see people opting out of that in order to move quickly, and the problem repeats itself.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    >Is that "a" caretaker, or a team? Like anything else, the team size would vary, based on workload. As for Excel, it doesn't lend itself well to centralization. Lots of spreadsheets would float around on local drives, email, wouldn't have any simple inbuilt way to determine who is using them, how often, if they even exist, if they were ever going to be shared with more than one person, and so on.