IT (yes, really) built a cheap copy of a SaaS app

“It's on a weird port.”— Managing Director

Reason:

Because the project has been 90% finished for 11 months. With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Daniel, a field technician

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

a Slack bot doing database writes

Database:

a nightly CSV export emailed to Petra

Authentication:

the security model is "Microsoft probably handles that"

Deployment:

hosted on Marco's personal Vercel account

Responsible:

a vendor whose support contract expired 17 months ago

Documentation:

a PowerPoint with 67 slides

Security situation:

security is handled by a checkbox called admin

Future disaster:

It will be migrated into SAP and then quietly migrated back.

Age: 13 days · originally expected to last 7 days · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 13 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 574 users, €506k per year, 59% chance of becoming business critical.