I've done the same, its a classic corporate warfare tactic, there exists an agreed on paper form to standardize the demarcation point between two warring internal groups (and all internal groups are at war because of stack ranked management reviews, formal or otherwise...), someone on the home team was manual data entering that paper form into "something" now you can push that labor cost onto the other side who now do the manual data entry for the home team. For bonus points toss each data entry into a database and provide some manner of weekly reporting via web or email cron job, maybe some dynamic error checking at data entry time. Classic weapon of internal politics. I've made a lot of money off this, historically.
There's a whole universe of MBA companies out there that see computers abstractly as mere fancy electric typewriters, merely a modern Linotype machine, its just a modern mimeograph nothing more, a way to format manual data entry for other humans to read and manually data enter in something else. Computers that don't compute or have flowcharts, merely manual human I/O devices. Adding the slightest bit of automation can blow the minds of business people.
Beware of the inner product effect. A simple web form that emails the ticketing system in restricted cases can eliminate enormous amounts of manual data re-entry if it happens enough, but trying to turn it into a generalized tool will merely result in a "simple web form" that becomes more complicated than the ticketing system everyone was avoiding because it was too complicated for end users. Don't write a feature complete 100% wrapper for JIRA with the expectation it'll be simpler, thats not going to turn out well. Of course in corporate warfare sometimes punishing the other internal department is more important than making things simpler and faster for all, and if it gets your team out of the data entry task and puts them on the data entry task, well, the guy on your team who signs your paychecks is going to be happy with you.
I've done the same, its a classic corporate warfare tactic, there exists an agreed on paper form to standardize the demarcation point between two warring internal groups (and all internal groups are at war because of stack ranked management reviews, formal or otherwise...), someone on the home team was manual data entering that paper form into "something" now you can push that labor cost onto the other side who now do the manual data entry for the home team. For bonus points toss each data entry into a database and provide some manner of weekly reporting via web or email cron job, maybe some dynamic error checking at data entry time. Classic weapon of internal politics. I've made a lot of money off this, historically.
There's a whole universe of MBA companies out there that see computers abstractly as mere fancy electric typewriters, merely a modern Linotype machine, its just a modern mimeograph nothing more, a way to format manual data entry for other humans to read and manually data enter in something else. Computers that don't compute or have flowcharts, merely manual human I/O devices. Adding the slightest bit of automation can blow the minds of business people.
Beware of the inner product effect. A simple web form that emails the ticketing system in restricted cases can eliminate enormous amounts of manual data re-entry if it happens enough, but trying to turn it into a generalized tool will merely result in a "simple web form" that becomes more complicated than the ticketing system everyone was avoiding because it was too complicated for end users. Don't write a feature complete 100% wrapper for JIRA with the expectation it'll be simpler, thats not going to turn out well. Of course in corporate warfare sometimes punishing the other internal department is more important than making things simpler and faster for all, and if it gets your team out of the data entry task and puts them on the data entry task, well, the guy on your team who signs your paychecks is going to be happy with you.