My experience has been that these little systems come up because we can't get IT to do what we want and have to work around them to get our jobs done. That's n

My experience has been that these little systems come up because we can't get IT to do what we want and have to work around them to get our jobs done. That's not to say all requests or IT customers are reasonable; some ideas are stupid or infeasible. Labelling those ideas as such without addressing the underlying business need that birthed them does no one any good. I rarely see IT organizations try to understand that; they judge requests primarily on technical merits. > So a little bit of training early on could indeed be a good thing. It would solve many issues. :) What we are talking about in the context of the article is a lot of training. It would give non-technical people the ability to go beyond something that barely works. It would increase the number of independent micro-systems, unless IT departments are willing to start really listening to their customer base.