Information quality and waste
This article really gives you a good insite as to why business users build systems. It really drives home what I come across every day working for a large company.
http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId=1035293
A couple notable quotes:
"With today's inexpensive personal computers, many knowledge-workers who cannot do what they need to do with their current systems build their own "hidden information factories" to support their information needs. They may download the data they require, keeping that data accurate and complete to meet their needs.This muda of overproduction cannot be blamed on the knowledge-workers. They are writing a silent complaint that their information and functional needs are not being met by the production systems, and they have had to take matters into their own hands in order to perform their work. The muda here is significant. All the time they spend to build their own systems and databases is a waste because that time cannot be spent doing their "value" work. One of my clients has counted more than 16,000 hidden information factories around their company."
AND
"There are, or course, "assumed" arguments for redundancy in operational systems, such as: required for transaction performance, we do not share the same customers, our products are different, it will take too long [to build a shared database and common system], we cannot get support for an enterprise database, etc.Rarely are these valid, justifiable business reasons for creating the enormous amounts of redundancy that waste valuable information systems professionals' time, money, office, computing and equipment resources. "
http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId=1035293
A couple notable quotes:
"With today's inexpensive personal computers, many knowledge-workers who cannot do what they need to do with their current systems build their own "hidden information factories" to support their information needs. They may download the data they require, keeping that data accurate and complete to meet their needs.This muda of overproduction cannot be blamed on the knowledge-workers. They are writing a silent complaint that their information and functional needs are not being met by the production systems, and they have had to take matters into their own hands in order to perform their work. The muda here is significant. All the time they spend to build their own systems and databases is a waste because that time cannot be spent doing their "value" work. One of my clients has counted more than 16,000 hidden information factories around their company."
AND
"There are, or course, "assumed" arguments for redundancy in operational systems, such as: required for transaction performance, we do not share the same customers, our products are different, it will take too long [to build a shared database and common system], we cannot get support for an enterprise database, etc.Rarely are these valid, justifiable business reasons for creating the enormous amounts of redundancy that waste valuable information systems professionals' time, money, office, computing and equipment resources. "
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