Digital Transformation built a whistleblowing case tracker

“We only need it until the migration.”— Katrin, Digital Transformation

Reason:

Officially because the shared password was last changed 88 days ago. Quietly rolled out to five countries.

Built by:

Katrin, the management assistant

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

an Electron app, for a form

Database:

a database on Bastian's laptop

Authentication:

the username and password are printed on the login page

Deployment:

running on a laptop with 26% battery

Responsible:

Operations, but they strongly disagree

Documentation:

a Notion page with one sentence and 12 empty headings

Security situation:

rate limiting consists of hoping nobody notices

Future disaster:

It will be presented to management as evidence that shadow IT must stop.

Age: 1.6 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 569 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €182k per year, alive 6x longer than intended, 5% chance of becoming business critical.