From what little information there is in the article, it sounds like lack of process was equally to blame as using Excel.
(Not that I would suggest using Excel, personally - I'd go with a small database and a simple web UI but then I'm not a Corporate Consultant looking to charge ££££ per day to faff around for 5 years and then abandon the project.)
There's nothing simple in running accounting in a healthcare system with 16B budget. A small database with simple web UI would have the same problems as Excel spreadsheet. The list of requirements for software automation of such thing would be on four digit number of pages scale. It does require a proper ERP.
>The healthcare system of a country was run in Excel. Didn't you read the title?
Obviously I have read not just the title, but also the article.
>I said the fact that it could be used for that, makes it an impresive achievement for the app
You can try to use a fork to dig a tunnel, but it is hardly an impressive achievement of the fork that it can be used this way, neither you could possibly dig anything big with it. It would be an impressive achievement for Excel, if it actually worked, but the article mentions that there were problems with accounting done this way.
Excel is a powerful tool that can handle massive amounts of data, no doubt. However its feature set is not enough for this kind of tasks. As @zimpenfish said in another comment in this thread, the problem was both in Excel and in processes. Task-appropriate tools help to build good processes around them.
If it creates long term value, is it truly the wrong tool?
Perhaps we should re-evaluate how and when we use things when presented with evidence that others are getting massive value out of tools we typically would have been biased against.
I think so. Using SQLite for an application of that scale would require lots of additional work around caching and queuing at the very least. Much of that could be reduced by using Postgres or some other database designed for that workflow.
Still, if many successful enterprises started SQLite for things of this scale, I should probably reach out to them to see whether there's anything missing from my analysis.
Honestly, I'm surprised that they didn't pay a foreign IT company $100 million to for software less functional than a spreadsheet like our government departments usually do.
