Suppose you are the accounts manager at a wholesale auto parts distributor.

You use spreadsheets to keep track of just about everything. So do your employees. You have hundreds of different spreadsheets to update, back up, and share. Some of them are getting extremely large and unwieldy. You’re worried about losing track of them or, worse, having a malicious employee permanently destroy them. A new hire fresh out of college says building a database would solve most of your problems. How would you determine if a database would really solve your problems? If you chose to develop a centralized database, how would you choose the employees to create the database? What criteria would you use to select those employees? How would you justify allocating people and money to developing this database?