Ephraim, I have a different point of view. I can remember when spreadsheets first came out. People were saying, "we can't possibly give "users" the ability to create their own financial models! Imagine the chaos! What if someone gets a formula wrong!" In the early 1990s IBM required a special approval process for an employee to get an email address -- fearing the chaos that might result if employees were permitted to issue electronic communication to those outside of the company network. In fact, there was a time when the British Crown had laws preventing people from operating a printing press without a permit (what if they printed something seditious!). Invariably, people benefit from the democratization of information. Empowerment trumps control.

Paul,
I guess we've come full circle then. Because you remember when people said "we can't possibly give users the ability to create their own financial models," using spreadsheets on their own C: drive.
Well, thanks to compliance, Sarbanes-Oxley, e-discovery, it is true once again.

Companies are realizing there is too great a risk factor in allowing standalone financial models, emails, etc.

Everything is moving back onto the corporate server.
Ephraim

I agree with Ephraim; companies have issues with models and data feeds "from the field". I don't disagree with the potential usefulness of these home grown (DIY) tools but the issue truely comes in when you look at the disparity in the results when you have the "same information" from two different people. Would you trust your finances to someone elses spreadsheet that isn't QA'd or audited? How about your healthcare information like tracking blood sugar, weight loss, liver proteins and enzymes, etc? Dang, I guess that calculation on the percentage difference was done wrong by Bob in the lab, I sure hope Mrs. Johnson doesn't find out that we did (insert any bad thing you can think of here) to Mr. Johnson ...

Ephraim, this is the great debate of our day: how to balance the need for solid compliance while maintaining an environment that fosters innovation. Products like Coghead allow companies to innovate faster by letting the people close to a business problem participate in the solution. But, unlike Excel, Filemaker and other PC-based approaches, Coghead's 100% web-based approach centralizes management, backup, disaster recovery, security and transaction logging.

Jim, I think you raise a different (and equally important) issue. Our goal (at Coghead) is to allow domain experts to create a particular class of applications. These applications can be QA'd and audited just like any other app. There will always be a need for programmers to create large, complex apps. But, in nearly every organization, there is a pressing need for smaller, less complex, departmental-level apps. These needs typically don't fit neatly into a packaged application and can't tolerate the time and expense of traditional custom application development. Today, when people have these needs they often resort to innappropriate methods like Filemaker or MS Access. We want to give them a better way.