Overcoming Management Discomfort With MS Access

[Family1]

I am a manager in the management accounting field, with managers beneath me and directors above me and other directors around me, who participate in planning our pilot systems and initiatives.



All my career in accounting people above me have had an anxiety or discomfort for letting me and my teams use Access. The companies end up having a desperate need that can be solved by Access and my management then agrees we have to use it. But there is often resistance and reluctance by other Directors who fear Access because of the following reasons:

a. they don't know access
b. they don't believe they could ever have the conceptual skills to program in access (and they may be right)
c. they don't know how to manage people who use access, which makes them concerned they might be seen as incompetent
d. they fear that I and my team would leave the company leaving them in the lurch (even though we document everything to standards of documentation that could be followed by someone else pretty easily).

These are all very real fears they face and I often have to navigate around the politics surrounding this discomfort.

My department has about 25-75 Access databases we use for every month x 12 months = hundreds of databases that help run the company. We use more LAN diskspace than anyone else. If we had better IT leadership and a better ERP system we would migrate many of these to MS SQL Programming Facility, but we tend to go very cheap on IT because top leaders don't understand and won't listen to our IT Director/VP's (there have been several).

My question for the Forum is, have you had similar experiences (I don't think I'm alone) and what in your opinion would be beneficial for us as a group of advanced users to increase the comfort level of management with the use of Access.

Thanks for your thoughts

[mcwilsong]

If you're still out there ...

There does seem to be a group of supervisors, managers, and above who deem access the devil's love child. The points you make are probably all valid. One of the things I've noticed at my current job is that IT seems to think that putting access in the hands of its users will make their job more difficult. Whether that is installing, upgrading, or supporting, I don't know because I have not heard a valid excuse yet. Although the IT staff who are most against providing any version of access above 2000 claims it is a support issue and they don't like having all those mdb files on the server.

I've been in IT, in one form or another, for the past 26+ years and I've never been in an organization where IT thinks/behaves/forces their belief that they run the business. Unless you are a direct provider of IT services, IT has always and will continue to always be a support of the business. In some strange twilight zone way, they've been able to con people into thinking they really matter. Hence the users are all subjugated to their personal views as to what technology staff should have access.

Coming from a database background, I find this very appalling. I've held jobs ranging from a word processor to a data entry clerk to a help desk tech to database developer to a network admin and in all my travels, this group of IT staff is the most self centered delusional group of people I've ever come across.

My reply may sound like a rant, but I say all of this to say the only solution is for management to change (as in turn over in personnel). I find all fear of technology to be a fear based, personal choice, which has nothing to do with the software, hardware, or any other device.

[ajetrumpet]

mcwilson,

You do make some good points in your post, but unfortunately it doesn't sound like you have the capacity to make that stuff work for you.

I am extremely secure in my IT abilities and I have people calling me, trying to recruit me because I am a good communicator. And everyone that is NOT in IT, be it business owners, salespeople or whoever, all know that it's still rare in this world to find an IT professional that has both high competency in technical issues and has great communication skills.

When someone looks at me or meets me, rarely do they assume that I work in IT. I act more or less like a salesman. You sound like the same type of person, although who can tell from an internet post right??

My suggestion to you would be to stop concerning yourself with the people that are obviously lifers at their IT desks. If you are as good as I am (not gloating intended there! ), why don't you just use the skills that you have to get some attention from management and SELL their a$$e$ on the fact that you know what you're talking about??

But remember too, you might as well throw the chance of any deal in the trash can as soon as you put someone down. Nothing turns people off more than that. ESPECIALLY people like management personnel out there that don't have a damn clue what they're doing OR how to handle IT people that don't want to communicate about anything.

Just a thought for ya my friend. Good luck.

[mcwilsong]

Adam,

I appreciate your thoughtful reply. I work very hard at not letting my true feelings show over things that I know are total bs on their part. However, it goes much deeper than that. I'm only dealing with the tip of the iceberg. The lack of decision making runs rampant for fear someone will call their bluff. I've been there for about 3 years now and I'm finding the lack of ability to make a firm decision goes very high in my department.

With my interactions with central IT, it doesn't seem to come from them. They are more than willing to place the tools their users need in their hands or give them alternatives if the one asked for is not available. Very customer service centric.

However, it seems to stop there. Once inside my department, all progress of updated technology grinds to a halt. I find they all have the latest and greatest on their desktops, but we are given the scraps and told to like it. From what I can tell, there are no avenues to complain to management that will provide relief, so we are left with doing all we can to circumvent our departments IT to get our work done.

It doesn't matter how much I know, when someone asks me for help, their managers tell their staff to "figure it out" and don't ask for help. If you're lucky enough to sneak a training through (such as one user who took a class in Access 2003), they are given Access 2000 (because that's the standard). Yet, we have Office 2007 installed?

I tell you, Sir ... I think I have stepped into the Twlight Zone!

[NTC]

In regard to the original post; definitely there can be suspicion by management of their own IT and generally it is in terms of the costs involved. But as to specific suspicion of Access specifically? - - - one can only then wonder - - in comparison to what? If one is suspect of Access specifically it almost implies they have an alternative in mind...

As PCs continue to progress in power the cross over point to needing a higher end solution i.e. sqlserver - continues to recede.

The primary decision I see wrestled with now is not about Access - - but rather about whether or not to develop in the traditional client/server solution vs developing a web based solution.

I continue to see organizations that originally started with excel sheets - and have become so addicted to that process that even though it has grown out of control and is suboptimal - and they know they should transition to a true database - they are so embedded with excel that they can't bring themselves to make the transition.

In your post you state you have ~100 databases. That seems strange - although perhaps there is a good business reason for it. But the fundamental concept of the database is to bring information together (thus the original name 'access') in order to be productive. Hopefully that productivity is obvious to management - and ideally they should have a "we can't live without it" type mentality.

[orange]

I agree with the comments from NTC. In addition, when you are talking about hundreds of Access databases, and it seems that the number jumps by a factor every year, I would suggest it is lacking management discipline and definitely IT discipline.

You're talking about a business - does it seem right that there are hundreds of databases - and from what you are saying, with nothing much holding them together except fear.
Does this company actually make a profit?

How do they do planning? I'm not saying they must have computers and large databases to make the business work, but they would certainly need standardized procedures (just to know which database(s) to run, in what sequence...)

Are you sure we're seeing the whole picture?

[NoellaG]

Hi,

an interesting conversation. Although I like working with Access myself, I wouldn't be to keen to give it to everyone. In a large company I see several dangers here:
* instead of relying on one central database, a lot of small databases tend to pop up, each with its own data that are not always synchronized and up to date.
* not everyone is a skilled database developer, so a lot of poorly written application will be out there
* when the person that has written the application leaves the company: who will sustain it?
* people should do what they are supposed to do and are payed for: managers should manage and not loose their time developing databases

As a second point I don't agree with the image of IT people as non-communicative nerds. Don't forget we're spending a lot of time doing analysis and talking to people to know what they want and more important what they need, or giving support and trainings.
Most of us are in fact very nice, social communicative people , you could call us data angels

greetings
NG

[mcwilsong]

NoellaG ... you make some good points. Access really should only be given to those skilled, not necessarily in database development, but in data analysis in general. I can totally see a department using anywhere from 25-75 databases, based on their business needs. Sometimes you don't need a production database, you just need to analysis, scrub, or process collected data before it goes into a production database. What better tool to use, than Access? Especially when we're dealing with a record size that Excel just can't handle.

Not every office or business is on top of their game over the course of its life where data will always be in a pristine condition. To get tools in the staff's hands that are hired to process, scrub, and clean that data is imperative and a necessity.

As to the "social communicative" people, you generally can't last a long time without at least being able to "flex" those personality traits!

[Family1]

Thank you everyone for your comments.

Yes we really do have hundreds of access databases. We have probably 50-75 databases that are copied each month for new data that we download from our very old sunset ERP system.

Yes we do make a lot of money and are a global company with over $1 billion in sales.

We are in a very old technology manufacturing and we compete on having low cost. So there is a great desire to do more with less. We try to get by without and see if it crashes.

Thus I have hired a crack team of hybrid accountant/access people. We build core systems that the company makes key decisions on.

Top management is in sales and doesn't see the need for investing in IT ERP, if we can continue to get by without investing.

Some think by doing so much in Access we make ourselves dependent on it. However, with out it, we would continue to experiment and try to do without, and fail to take mission critical businesses decisions on pricing. Our thin margins would be chaotic to manage, with the philosophy of "lets see if we can get by without investing in IT". I suppose eventually top management would break down and invest in IT if they didn't have Access.

I think this is why IT hates Access. It prevents IT from getting funding if companies never migrate to better platforms and continue to use the Access prototypes as production software.

[ajetrumpet]

The lack of decision making runs rampant for fear someone will call their bluff. I've been there for about 3 years now and I'm finding the lack of ability to make a firm decision goes very high in my department.

do you seriously think that your department and/or company is the only one with that problem?? For **** sake, look at our current president. He couldn't find a coherent sentence if his life depended on it!! Also remember that government has a HUGE stake in large corporations and how they can proceed in the future with regard to making money.

So by saying what I just said, it's getting harder and harder to distinguish actual ignorance of management decisions from the sheer fear that any decisions made will be counter acted by out-of-control government bs. Lets face it sir, the government is probably the scariest and unpredictable thing in this world. I mean, if you truly want to witness human ignorance and fear, look at the top officials in government. I stopped following them and their speeches and/or news articles long ago because it literally makes me puke. I can't watch it. My heart hurts because it's so fake and untruthful.

Just saying...it's good to take into account what management personnel has at stake, and sometimes it's a lot more than profit or loss. Just talked to a guy down in MO the other day that seriously wants to recruit me for my ability to close deals, but he can't hire anyone just yet because the government is not giving him any reason to believe that adding expense won't result in more regret and uncertainly than he can handle. Now THAT'S a smart thinker. I didn't say anything else to him other than "I understand". THAT is someone that I would really like to work for. He sure as he$$ is more intelligent than the moron running this he$$hole of a country.

Sorry...at least I used dollar signs though right??

[mcwilsong]

[QUOTE=ajetrumpet;59999]do you seriously think that your department and/or company is the only one with that problem?? For **** sake, look at our current president. He couldn't find a coherent sentence if his life depended on it!! Also remember that government has a HUGE stake in large corporations and how they can proceed in the future with regard to making money.

I have no delusions that there are not other departments/companies with similar mindsets. The point that I was making is that the IT of this department is one of the most useless I've ever come across. If we're lucky enough to actually deal with central IT, it is a completely different story. Very user friendly. From all the organizations I've been fortunate enough to have worked with and for, there are the usual dysfunctions that rear their ugly head, but it's mostly individuals who have become lifers and know no other way of life except their current limited existence.

I attended a university (at the graduate level) that had no clue how real businesses behaved. This was during the late 80's, during a time when one could actually find a job without having a college degree. My point is that the mentality there was one that believed nothing else existed outside their limited view and as someone who brought in a "real world" mentality, I had as tough of a time relating to them as they to me.

The same goes in the scenario I described earlier. It's nothing more than a personal belief system that has been transferred to an organizational or departmental belief system and made the "law of the land".

I may be looking at it shortsightedly, the only way I can see this culture changing is to change the players involved. It doesn't appear that's going to happen!

By the way ... when was the last president that could put a coherent group of sentences together? Kennedy?

[NoellaG]

Hi AJE,


as an answer to your quote:

Lets face it sir, the government is probably the scariest and unpredictable thing in this world.

Why don't you come to Belgium? We're doing it without a government for more than a year now...

greetings
NG

[ajetrumpet]

MC,

I read an article not too long ago on CNN that was covering management views on IT personnel and how to manage them. I didn't read the whole thing nor did I do much research on it out of curiosity, but I did guess why management seems to not handle these people.

I'm not sure if it's this way in your organization or not, but I know plenty of IT workers that are hourly workers primarily because they can't get out of the "wait for tasks to do" mentality. And obviously employers don't like those kind of people anymore. The only problem with IT people being that way is the fact that no one else, especially management personnel, knows how to maintain computer systems that run companies today. So, in my view, that puts them between a rock and hard place. I'm sure they're thinking something like "I can't justify their salaries other than having them sit there and wait for the systems to crash".

Isn't that we do, I mean really?? Other than private companies that are constantly changing and upgrading systems because MS is pushing .NET **** down their throats. I mean, take a high profile hospital like the one here in Iowa City, IA where I'm at...they have plenty of IT people, but the truth of the matter is that if every workers were at least somewhat competent in using machines, there would be a need for half the IT staff. But you and shouldn't complain about things like that really, should we??

I guess i can complain somewhat about because I have a fairly high level of knowledge which keeps me out of the entry level "IT support" bs roles. But anyway, other than the rambling that I'm doing, I think pretty much everyone is confused about how to IT people. Do you concur, doc??

[NTC]

it is this phrase of your post I find most interesting:
".....by doing so much in Access we make ourselves dependent on it....."

But that would be true of any database. It is also true of your accounting software.

Yes, one is dependent upon their core software. Whether it be Oracle, db2, sqlserver or Access - which are horizontal platform applications. Or whether it be Siebel, PeopleSoft, SAP, etc which are erp style applications. In the end you are extremely dependent upon the software.

So it isn't an Access issue per se. The key issue is productivity. Access is far & away the most cost efficient software package out there - - thanks to the tremendous increase in PC power. Any frugal company should have the mindset that "if it can be done on Access - then do it on Access" - - because any other technology alternative will be more expensive. You can take that to the bank.

Good Luck