R&D built a third CRM

“It's just CRUD.”— IT Service Desk

Reason:

Honestly? Because the process owner is Petra, who has never used the document management system. Already exported 170,978 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Priya, a product owner

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

WordPress with eleven plugins

Database:

a CSV that gets overwritten every Friday

Authentication:

the shared account belongs to Katrin, who left 12 months ago

Deployment:

deployed from a Git commit nobody has pushed

Responsible:

Olivier, according to Jira

Documentation:

a Confluence page linking to another Confluence page

Security situation:

passwords are "encrypted" with Base64

Future disaster:

It will become part of the company's "digital core" slide deck.

Age: 8.9 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 6 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 74 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 108x longer than intended, 23% chance of becoming business critical, older than the department using it.