the excel syndrome

What is the excel syndrome?

It's an executive manager who uses Excel and is convinced he "knows" computers. You see it a lot now. And it's one of the big things that's changed in the last few years. Ten years ago, if you said "e-commerce" everyone's eyes glazed over and they said "just make something work".

Today, all the execs use Excel and buy things from Amazon. So when an IT professional says : "setting up this database correctly and adding accounts with the right security and tables with the right schemas will take... er... 2 weeks", the exec says "WHAT!?? that's insane! Why... I can do it in Excel in 10 minutes". Then he (or sometimes she, but that's pretty rare), slashes the project estimate.

Oh, I know I'm exaggerating for emphasis. But the syndrome exists. It really does. My CEO just said today that we weren't delivering fast enough. Fast enough compared to ... what? How does he have a feel for how long it *should* take?

I started noticing this a few years ago. Non-IT people started to think they understood IT well enough to second guess their IT staff. I see it among IT people too -- especially those who have worked in small environments and with older, more limited systems. Sure, it may be possible to export a file from DBase from a live system with a simple real-time query. But.. um... DBase isn't relational? Oh, and there's that little thing called "security"? And the DBase database that only held 2MB of data is a slightly different creature than a SqlServer database that holds 200GB.

It is part of a trend in the industry. IT has become big business. Consulting companies and vendors are big business. As the money that goes into IT grows, more and more people are trying to get their little part of it. Naturally, that includes the execs and the bean counters.

I'm not sure where IT will go in the future, but it's days of free-wheeling are done, I think. It will become more and more driven by people who have an opinion on how the money is being spent, even if they don't know what their opinion means. It's kind of like those Windows7 commercials where the people are saying the invented Windows7, because they sent an email to Microsoft telling them to make computers better.

There are a lot of those people.....