Business Intelligence built a procurement savings dashboard

“We'll clean it up after the audit.”— Regional Sales Lead

Reason:

Because procurement needs three quotes for something costing €240,000. Copied to production via floppy disks.

Built by:

Priya, an analyst

Build time:

3 evenings

Built with:

WordPress with eleven plugins and one critical shortcode

Database:

a network drive mapped as Z: on three people's computers

Authentication:

backups are encrypted with the same password as production

Deployment:

running on port 3000 in production

Responsible:

a shared mailbox nobody reads

Documentation:

a README containing 16 broken links

Security situation:

production secrets are in the frontend bundle

Future disaster:

It will cause IT to ask "what server?".

Age: 267 days · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 267 days ago · original builder left 63 days ago

Rated legendary mostly because: 836 users, 83% chance of becoming business critical, €308k per year.