Certianly you may use anything I post to support your position.
Access is a much more powerful tool than most IT people give it credit for.
This is based on two things. The first being ignorance. They see Access as
nothing more than a desktop tool for individual users to throw together small
personal apps. They have no knowledge or understanding of its power.
I currently support six Access applications used by our company that
supports all the billing, invoicing, meter installation, implementation, and
reading, contract and new client implementation. Our operational and client
facing applications are C# web apps using SQL Server 2005 to support multi
family housing. This includes all property management and resident access
applications, but all our internal operations are supported by Access 2003
applications. The only exception being General Ledger which is a purchased
package. Our company is large and supports close to 500 multi family
properties.
Some of the apps use SQL Server 2005 and some use Jet. Others are a mixture
of the two. To get around the 2Gig limit for Jet, each Client/Region has its
own mdb file. To change to a different Client/Region, the user selects the
Client/Regions and the app drops links to the current C/R and relinks to the
one selected.
We also use Access for all development project estimating and tracking. It
is our largest expense.
The other objection to Access by IT is control and ownership. It is more
important to them to have total ownership off all data and applications than
it is to get the company's business done. It is "computing for computing's
sake" rather than computing to support the business model.
At one level, this is understandable because they are concerned about the
integrity and security of the data. It is, after all, their responsibility.
But, they are approaching it from the wrong prespective. Rather than fight
departmental solutions, they should support the concept and be involved in
ensuring the data model is consistent with the enterprise model and that
security is correctly implemented. They don't understand that developers
working at the departmental level are actually reducing their workload. They
also don't understand that most of the people developing at the departmental
level are closer to and have a better understanding of departmental
requirements and business models.
A few years ago, I was working on contract for a very large global company
who is a major defense contractor. Using Access for any applicatons at any
level was expressly forbidden; however, our department was responsible for
the financial management of a 67 million dollar contract. This included
providing a very detailed monthly invoice that averaged about 6 million
dollars. It had to include every material purchase down to the component and
every hour of human resource time. All we got from them was a downloaded
Excel spreadsheet spit out from the Enterprise system. It could not be done
by hand in time to present the invoice to the customer. We developed an
application that would transform the data and create the invoice. It also
provided tracking information for our managers. Corporate was not happy we
had done that, but would/could not provide the support we needed.
Than it came time to move to a different ERP. The "big IY guys" came from
coprorate to show us how the system was designed. On an entire wall of
diagrams, our whole business management group was one small box that said
"Create Monthy Invoice". The proposed to continue spitting the Excel
spreadsheet out of the Oracle database. The spreadsheet always had extensive
errors that had to be hand corrected before we could continue the invoice
process. I requested rather than supply us the spreadsheet, the allow us a
read only View we could link to from our Access application. You would have
thought I yelled %#45$@! in church. We were told in no uncertain terms it
was not even open for consideration and that they only tolerated our Access
application because they didn't have the time to provide a "real"
application. It did not matter the spreadsheet was always late and usually
incorrect which caused us to have to call corporate with a list of errors
they then had to correct.
Sorry to be so long winded, but this will give you idea that you are not
alone. Resistance to Access applications is the norm in the large IT world.
Best of Luck, keep up the fight.
(the above will hopefully some ammunition you can use when talking to non IT
managment)
