Working around official applications: experiences from a large engineering project

We describe facets of specialized software applications developed to support a large collaborative engineering program. Although many of the applications were bespoke efforts, designed to the requirements of users, virtually all major applications have an unofficial spreadsheet or database backing up the official application. These tools invariably play a critical but unofficial role in the day-to-day work, acting as more than just as a work-around, while the official applications are used primarily for mandated record keeping and auditing purposes. Surprisingly, there is often management approval for these unofficial applications, but at the same time, desire to elimination these applications and only use the official applications. We discuss the implications of this finding for future collaborative applications and long-term record keeping.