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It's because of that condescending, know-it-all attitude that people actively avoid getting IT involved in anything, and prefer half-assed Excel hacks. And they're absolutely right.
Work with them and not over them, and you may get an opportunity to improve the process in ways that are actually useful. Those improvements aren't apparent until you're knee-deep in mud yourself, working hand by hand with the people you're trying to help.
Software development delivers products, internal products and solutions that should be leveraged by business to improve rate of growth.
If you have software development department chucked into IT and make them be supporters that run in the background you are wasting potential or wasting money on their salaries.
If you want supporters make it IT only and pay for SaaS solutions that everyone is using.
Also, if you have ever worked with anyone trying to get specifications worked out, you’ll see that most people (including devs) rely on intuition rather than checklists and will always forget to tell you something that is critical.
The thing is that cost of changes in the business can be a simple memo. But for software that usually means redesign.
That's an illusion. The reality is, it's all hacky solutions on top of hacky solutions. Even in manufacturing: the spec may be fixed, and the factory line produces identical products by the million - but the spec was developed through an ad-hoc process, and the factory line itself is a pile of hacks that needs continued tuning to operate. And there is no perfectly specced out procedure for retooling a factory line to support the newest spec that came out of design department - retooling is, in itself, a small R&D project.
> Also, if you have ever worked with anyone trying to get specifications worked out, you’ll see that most people (including devs) rely on intuition rather than checklists and will always forget to tell you something that is critical.
This is the dirty truth about the universe - human organizations are piles of hacks, always in flux; and so is life itself. The sameness and harmony we see in nature is an illusion brought on by scale (in two ways - at large scale, because we live too short to see changes happening; at small scale, because the chaos at biomolecular level averages out to something simpler at the scale we can perceive).
Order and structure are not the default. It takes hard work to create and maintain them, so it's better be worth the cost. The prevalence of Excel-based hacks in corporate is a proof positive that, for internal software, it usually isn't worth it, despite what the IT department thinks.
> The thing is that cost of changes in the business can be a simple memo. But for software that usually means redesign.
Which is why you shouldn't be building cathedrals that need expensive rework every other week because of some random memo. Instead, go down to where people work; see them tweaking their shovels, take those shovels and make the tweak they want the proper way.
A bit of tangent: I think the idea of coddling users is what’s leading to the complexity of all those system. We’re building cathedrals when we need tents. Instead of having small, sharp software tools that can be adjusted easily, we’re developing behemoths that’s supposed to handle everything under the sun (systemd, a lot of modern package managers, languages that is tied to that one IDE,…)
I'm not really arguing for mega-tools with locked-down workflows. But there's usually some happy-ish medium between chaos and rigid monoliths.
