Your boss had a good point. At some point, users become savvy to the whole thing and stop complaining and start trying to fix it on their own.
It starts with 'Bobby in accounting told me to X when Y happens' and snowballs from there.
It's horrible on productivity and when IT finally does try to fix it, it's often much, much worse. (Though, when the user gets it right, IT doesn't have to fix it after all.)
Or they will stop using the system altogether and that's when you start having these unofficial shadow systems spring up, developed by someone who read Access For Dummies in 7 Days, and next thing you know you've got 250,000 credit card numbers posted on pastebin.
that's when you start having these unofficial shadow systems spring up
Exactly what happened to me today.
An engineer [1] opened up a ticket because some java code he was developing to insert attachments to our BOM system was returning funny errors.
Which is fine except he'd somehow gotten credentials for my production system and was testing his code against live bits.
Hooray for initiative, but good lord, fella: how would you feel if I ran out on the floor and started testing new widgets on equipment we're building for customers?
It starts with 'Bobby in accounting told me to X when Y happens' and snowballs from there.
It's horrible on productivity and when IT finally does try to fix it, it's often much, much worse. (Though, when the user gets it right, IT doesn't have to fix it after all.)
It's also horrible on morale.