> but business processes that rely on spreadsheets certainly do not
I wonder if this migration from spreadsheets to databases is what helps ossify business culture in older companies. With spreadsheets, change and iteration are easy with fast cycles. With a database, change is a pain and iteration cycles are very long since everything has to though multiple stages of review, approval, and implementation.
Interesting idea. I'd say probably yes, to some extent. Bringing back the human element, I'd say the businesses still stuck on spreadsheets are much less open to change than those who are willing to adopt database technology.
While long review cycles for schema changes are annoying, I find it more worrying that most businesses have zero review process at all for spreadsheets.
That's why your standard IT guy loves databases and hates democratized software like Sheets. You can run a 80% of business in a spreadsheet but IT Guy doesn't want to be disintermediated.
No, as an actual IT guy myself, our job is to support and improve business technical operations. Most of us want _less_ work. If we wanted to be intermediaries, we'd be middle managers.
I don't know how much time you've spent supporting spreadsheet users, but I work with them daily and I see first-hand the amount of energy being wasted. Stuff that takes them all day, they could do in a single SQL query. Probably wouldn't take them more than a day to learn how.
It's not about democracy, it's about doing things in a sensible way. I'd be happy if they used another "democratic" tool like Microsoft PowerBI and a fully-managed database.
I wonder if this migration from spreadsheets to databases is what helps ossify business culture in older companies. With spreadsheets, change and iteration are easy with fast cycles. With a database, change is a pain and iteration cycles are very long since everything has to though multiple stages of review, approval, and implementation.