My employer, a semi-large co., purchased three geographically dispersed manufacturing facilities from a multinational a few years back and I was on the IT absorption team. Their strong standardization in the desktop, server and networking areas made the project mostly painless, however the number one shocker was the pervasiveness of home grown Access databases.
This was repeated over and over: data from their central HQ was "linked" inside departmental Access databases and used as the basis for anything from vacation tracking to actual production-related activities such as product recall management.
Their corporate DBAs pleaded ignorance while our DBAs worked much OT to keep the project on track for the network-severance drop-dead date.
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My employer, a semi-large co., purchased three geographically dispersed manufacturing facilities from a multinational a few years back and I was on the IT absorption team. Their strong standardization in the desktop, server and networking areas made the project mostly painless, however the number one shocker was the pervasiveness of home grown Access databases.
This was repeated over and over: data from their central HQ was "linked" inside departmental Access databases and used as the basis for anything from vacation tracking to actual production-related activities such as product recall management.
Their corporate DBAs pleaded ignorance while our DBAs worked much OT to keep the project on track for the network-severance drop-dead date.