This kind of thing is the bread & butter of enterprise developers. 80% of time is spent either debugging funky problems caused by undocumented or unsupported i

This kind of thing is the bread & butter of enterprise developers. 80% of time is spent either debugging funky problems caused by undocumented or unsupported integrations, or in creating new undocumented and unsupported integrations. Data dictionaries in the form Ed describes almost never exist, and are never maintained. Not to sound too much like an apologist -- and ymmv wildly across business sectors and profitability ranges -- but if software isn't your product you probably just don't care too much about it as long as it mostly works. Having just come from the "MS is finally auto-updating IE" thread, let me just say that the best thing for repressed developers in the enterprise has been the browser wars. So much crap has broken over the last year, with re-architecting & re-writing being the only viable options, that companies are finally starting to be forced into listening to their engineers. I love it. Big opportunities for consultants, I imagine, not to mention the "good guys" in the internal IT departments.