Scalability and General Question for you guys

[Chefjay22]

Hello. I have a strange request… I am not looking for any one answer in
particular, but perhaps your opinion on how to deal with the following
situation… and may be how your company dealt with the following:

The company I work for has grown very rapidly, almost to quick. We went
from about 350 employees to over 1500 in 3 years. During this growth there
was a need by our business units to track or analyze data, and of course no
budget to do so. So they went and created their own MS Access databases with
no input from the IT department. They have now created over 100 business
critical MS Access applications.

So now that our company recognizes these applications as being business
critical they want to find the best way to assess risk to business
operations, and find the best solution to support these application including
file backups etc.

Have any of you ever dealt with a similar situation? Are there any third
party tools that are good for version control/backup for instances like this?
Any input would be very well received. I appreciate your time… I already
know how I want to deal with this situation, but nobody listens to me

More background on our situation:

Let’s see, to make things even worse we run a both NOVEL and AD on our
network! What a darn mess!!! To say the least our network is not the most
stable and I frequently encounter corrupted files… and have run across weird
MS Access issues that I have never seen in my 10 years supporting MS Access.
Oh yeah, we totally live 7 years in the past and mostly use MS Access 2000,
with a few lucky folks having 2003! So a mixed office environment makes my
life so much easier too lol. Think that wraps it up… I’m thinking I should
just get my resume out there and move on lol.

Thanks!

 

[Wayne-I-M]

Hi

There are many many people on this forum with a vast amount of knowledge and
experience in just your type of situation - I am not one of these.

My one comment would be (not sure if it's an option though) that "there are
times when you just have to stop and start again".

This will cause problems if you have an empire builders in the organisation
but if you can convince the top people then you may have a chance. If not
it's going to get worse until one day it will all come to a grinding stoop.


Good luck