@Master Chief said:
@blakeyrat said:I'm with Jasmine. You gotta run the numbers.
Look, everybody, everybody, thinks their business need is so unique that no existing product could possibly cover it. They're wrong. In fact, if anything I'd say the opposite: almost any product could be easily modified to meet your business need.
Like Excel? :D
There's not a lot you can't do with Excel, given sufficient incentive. Almost all of it would be better done another way, but Excel can do it. It's quite disturbing that quite a few of the business apps I've run across are actually even worse than hacking something up in Excel would be, particularly where the business is only using a small subset of the application's features.
Whilst complaining about/advising upgrade of the ineffable shitness of the case management software one place I worked, I said something like 'I could do better in Excel'. Obviously, they laughed. Seemed an interesting thing to try and do, though, so in my break that day I spent half an hour roughing out an Excel system. Boss had a look and said 'oh, you're right, it is better in Excel - how long would it take you to finish this?'
After beating my head on the desk for a minute or two, I persuaded him that buying a decent case management system was a better idea.
@KrakenLover said:
One of the things I'm working on is changing the way we do things in general. Not just replacing inadequate technology, but throwing out old processes that just don't make sense anymore, and developing new ones that are efficient and add value rather than being an obstacle to getting work done quickly & well.
That said, there are alternatives to developing a custom system. But I'm loath to encourage the use of Excel in this manner because it's just going to send the wrong message; and won't help my co-workers to think outside the box and realize that there are better solutions out there than networked spreadsheets.
That makes sense to me. (And can I just say that unlike some others here, I can understand why you'd want to work there - sounds interesting.) I find the idea quite amusing, though, because there have been a few times I've done the exact opposite - get rid of an overly heavyweight app, server to run it, maybe a Citrix (spit) server to go with it, and so-on, in favour of a simple set of linked spreadsheets totalling a few megs.
(Not that I'm saying you app is overly heavyweight, or anything like that. But the ones I changed were.)