We've got an Excel spreadsheet floating around right now (globally) at my company to capture various pieces of information about each countries technology usage. The problem is that it goes out, gets changes, but they're never obvious, and often conflicting - and then we have to smash them together. To me, the workbook is no more than a garbage in/garbage out type application waiting to be written.
In a company that has enough staff and knowledge to dedicate to Enterprise projects, for some reason, agile and language/frameworks such as Rails, Grails, etc. are frowned upon. That said, I can't help but think that this is almost a perfect fit for the need, given the scaffolding features for extremely simple implementations of capturing raw fields with only a couple lookups (i.e. a pre-defined category). I'm thinking this would be considered a very appropriate use of these frameworks.
Has anyone worked on these types of quick and dirty apps before in normally large-scale, heavy-handed enterprise environments with success? Any tips for communicating this need/appropriateness to non-technical management?
The only way to get this implemented in a rigid organization is to get this working and demo it -- without approval. It's very hard for management to say no to a finished project.