The biggest problem is that a lot of them are siloed, sometimes seemingly intentionally.
E.g. we have a bunch of stuff in Airtable. It's great. You can do amazing stuff with it, and it has a great API for most things.
Except for the change history and comments.
When you're aware of this, it is fine, but the moment your business processes start depending on using the comments and change history, you're locked in unless you're willing to use phantomjs or similar to log in and use the API (of course there is one) that their web client uses to access the comments, in a way that is a massive pain.
I'm happy for users to start building stuff and automating stuff. The bigger problem is when they don't design and don't understand the trade-offs. Often it works great for years, until it doesn't and you have a massive job untangling dependencies in some cobbled together solution.
Sometimes that is worth it.
Sometimes it causes you to incur costs far higher than what you saved initially because knowledge often gets lost as these system grow in complexity without any coherent thought behind them.
Very often, even if you end up using these tools, you'd still be far better off if there was still a review process to get someone to say "stop,if you do it this way you're creating a risky dependency, do it this way instead." Or to say "we really need the dev team to handle this."
It’s indeed a job of solution architect or CTO in smaller companies to do this review and develop a strategy telling, when something needs to be replaced by a custom code. Also it’s important to look at the costs not only in absolute values, but also relative to the IT budget. It’s ok to spend later 200K instead of 50K now if company revenue is going to be 10x higher or if your current budget is consumed by a more important project. Cost of money and resources can be different.
E.g. we have a bunch of stuff in Airtable. It's great. You can do amazing stuff with it, and it has a great API for most things.
Except for the change history and comments.
When you're aware of this, it is fine, but the moment your business processes start depending on using the comments and change history, you're locked in unless you're willing to use phantomjs or similar to log in and use the API (of course there is one) that their web client uses to access the comments, in a way that is a massive pain.
I'm happy for users to start building stuff and automating stuff. The bigger problem is when they don't design and don't understand the trade-offs. Often it works great for years, until it doesn't and you have a massive job untangling dependencies in some cobbled together solution.
Sometimes that is worth it.
Sometimes it causes you to incur costs far higher than what you saved initially because knowledge often gets lost as these system grow in complexity without any coherent thought behind them.
Very often, even if you end up using these tools, you'd still be far better off if there was still a review process to get someone to say "stop,if you do it this way you're creating a risky dependency, do it this way instead." Or to say "we really need the dev team to handle this."
reply