But then IT of bigger companies treats Access as not a real DB and often disregards it with the same contempt as Excel.
My beef is that tech folk have a tendency to make themselves the customer, or maximize convenience to IT over whatever the actual problem is. Internally, the politics of the company tend to dictate this stuff. In the marketplace, software is usually much better!
Tech folks: That's a business use case
Business users: This is something I do 500x a day, this I do 10x a day, this I do once a month
PMs are supposed to be the ones to do this work, but they tend to be technically clueless and blinded by project timeline spreadsheets.
BAs usually don't take the time to actually ask the user "Why are you doing this?" and get all the nuances.
As a service owner of some fairly significant technology services, every time one of my colleagues “fixes” some business problem with an enterprise IT system, it’s measurably worse than a well-defined excel driven process.
My favorite was when our travel and expense system moved to some Oracle monstrosity, and we literally hired full time staff to data enter expenses that were submitted on paper because field service folks were spending 5-10 hours a week on expense submission.
Another great example is when almost anything is “improved” by some sort of quick and dirty interim servicenow task.