My job has me in a unique position. I am supposed to help enable end users…enable them to create their own applications. These are applications that the formal IT department either doesn’t have the time to address, or they are applications that the Corporate departments determined to be not be as important as others.
Of course, to the user who is being asked to do more by their leadership, a little app that may automate some goofy time consuming task they do frequently is important. It could help them get a better year end review….it could help them get all their work done for the day so they can go home with a little less stress. Who says that isn’t important?
So, why bring this up? Well, over the last few days I have been in several meetings which are also attended by technical people directly responsible for work on “the critical business apps”. That, in itself is not the problem. The problem is when these people decide to snicker, laugh, and make degrading comments about the applications the end users are writing.
They talk about how those simplistic approaches (used by the end users) are a joke.
Give me a freakin break. Yes, the users typically leverage much leaner technologies than the enterprise efforts. Yes, they usually wear the hats of requirements gatherer, UI designer, coder, tester, and implementer. Yes, their style would not hold up on a multi-year massive project. But guess what…..they never said it would.
As I sat in a meeting the other day and listened to one of these experts rail on one of the end user applications, I was striken with the technical arrogance/insecurity this “techie” had. Have the experts elevated themselves so far from the ground-floor details that they are no longer in touch with the true goal in all our work??? Aren’t we all simply trying to help our company be more successful?
Who the hell cares if someone in Ad Services used Access to create a tool instead of a Java or C++ n-tier solution. Should we not praise the person for their ingenuity and desire to help make things more efficient?
Yes, there is always the risk that the app will grow beyond what the developer or the tool can handle. And, yes, they will likely come to IT for help. So what? Doing business is a risk. Being successful requires risk taking. The person/people who started the company understood this.
Unfortunately, I think those of us who are now removed from those risk takers are too content to spend a large portion of our time debating the merits of one technology over another. We should be reaching out to the end users….the ones who are doing that day-to-day work that keeps the company’s wheels on….and understanding their position better. Understand what they are trying to accomplish.
And most of all, try to reach back into your past, and remember when solving problems was a source of personal reward. Remember the thrill of innovation.
Filed under: end users, programming
