I have a long and mostly irrelevant story... but for one detail.
Some years ago, I had a client in a big enough corporation that the marketing team and the sales team were ridiculously siloed. It was also a sales-driven company, so the 6 or 8 marketing people were way down the totem pole from the army of sales people, which meant that the VP of Sales and Marketing was the VP of SALES and marketing.
One Wednesday, the VP of SALES and marketing says they are planning a series of conferences and they need the marketing team to build a mini website for each conference and the first one needs to be ready on Monday. All the details are stored on a series of Excel spreadsheets.
Specifically, he asked the marketing guy to create a system where Sales could upload an Excel spreadsheet via FTP with the first tab being the conference overview, and then each subsequent tab being the session list for that day and a script will turn it into a website with nice nav and all that. They sheepishly asked if their in-house designer and I could do it that weekend. Sure (PHP has a good library for parsing Excel sheets as it turns out).
Anyway, long story long... the designer and I work through the weekend using the sample spreadsheets and by Monday we're ready to go. Works great.
Then I make some chance comment about some inconsistencies between the Excel sheets and that the sales team will need to avoid that if they want it to work right. At which point the sales teams tells us, "Oh, we don't use Excel. This is all in a database. We just put it in Excel to make it easier to send to you. It's a lot of work for us to get each one of these out of the database and into Excel."
And then the canceled the conference series.
The marketing team was great actually. Perhaps my best client ever, but only because the head of marketing did a good job of shielding me from the rest of the company. At a certain point, though, they were using me too much and were told they had to either make me an employee (in-person required) or fire me. I chose to have them fire me.
Anyway, the whole thing makes me think that there is some diligent employee somewhere who is tasked with getting the info out of the database and into an Excel spreadsheet so that they can put it on the website.
