Business System Consultation Center - Our Business System ColumnVol.140 2023.06.01 Takahashi Minoru

An excellent in-house SE creates a culture where in-house SEs are no longer needed

Thank you for your interest and continued support.
This is Takahashi from the Marketing Plan Research Laboratory.


When developing an in-house system, how many items and what types of items should be prepared?
I imagine you struggle greatly with defining this.


By “system,” I don’t just mean large-scale in-house systems built with Access;
but also includes “small-scale” projects, such as transcribing and compiling transaction data into Excel.
Regardless of the system’s scale, defining the number of fields it contains is a key aspect of development.


I recommend defining the number of fields in the system to be as few as possible.
The reason for this lies in human nature: people tend to want to fill in blank spaces.


The more an in-house system becomes established within the company,
the more employees—that is, people who do not fully understand the system’s specifications—
will start using the system and entering data into the predefined forms.


From the perspective of an inputter who does not understand the system specifications,
"If I leave a field blank, won’t that cause an error?"
“Will someone point this out to me later?”
“It just feels wrong to leave a field blank,”
Regardless of how important a field is,
it’s only human nature to feel uneasy when there are blank fields.


The more fields there are to fill out in a form,
the longer it takes to fill out the form.
Even if a field is technically optional,
to someone unfamiliar with the specifications, it will appear to be a required field.


It is best to define the number of fields in a system to be as few as possible.


That's all, Thank you for reading.

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