Beware the wrong tool in the wrong hands
Who, Me? If there is one Microsoft product guaranteed to send a shiver down the spine of an IT pro more than Excel shoehorned into the wrong place, it’s Access inserted into any place. Welcome to Who, Me? Our story comes from an anonymous financial services company where a reader Regomised as “Chris” used to work back in the day. He ran a branch office, which employed 20 people and was responsible for supplying custom servers, built in-house, to connect customers to the outfit’s POS network. The IT team initially consisted of our hero and a PFY, and the duo performed all the duties required to keep the lights on, as well as building servers to order. It was a delightfully simple system. An order would come in, one of the pair would eyeball the stockroom, collect required hardware, and order in any components that were running low. It all went swimmingly… “until the Operations Manager got involved,” explained Chris. The manager looked at the value of some of the parts (“Ariel 32 DSP Modems and the like”) and decided that a stock control application was needed to keep track of everything. The Been-There-Done-That merchants will be unsurprised to learn that “the cost of upgrading our accounts package with a stock module was deemed too expensive, so the Operations Manager, who thought of himself as a bit of a coding wizard, decided he would build one.
