Procurement built an invoice matcher

“We just need it until SAP is updated.”— IT Service Desk

Reason:

Honestly? Because the dashboard disagrees with Finance by €2,400. Presented in a town hall as "innovation".

Built by:

Anja, someone from Procurement

Build time:

27 minutes

Built with:

Airtable plus four Zapier zaps

Database:

a GitHub Gist that became business critical

Authentication:

the production token is in a Jira ticket

Deployment:

running on a VM with 2 GB of free disk space

Responsible:

Finance, apparently

Documentation:

a Teams recording nobody has permission to open

Security situation:

the threat model is "why would anyone attack us?"

Future disaster:

It will get SSO after somebody shares the password publicly.

Age: 6.8 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 3 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 74 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 86% chance of becoming business critical, €346k per year, alive 83x longer than intended.