Are you developing a system? or just programming?

It is easy to do programming today; there are so many powerful development tools that are developer-friendly, e.g. Excel / Access VBA, Visual Studio, MATLAB, R…etc.  A lot of business users who are analytical, logical smart, choose to develop their own business application.  These systems can be agile, cost effective and deliver what they want!

However, many business users have handed over these hidden business applications back to IT department in a few years.  These lovely applications have grown into monsters that they can’t control; it takes too long to process, whenever they want to add a small enhancement, something unexpected fail or certain disasters happen, e.g. the business user who created the application left the company.

What are their problems?  Why did these business applications have such short life expectancy?  How can we manage our applications?

Management