One of the things I hate developing most in the world (there are many others) is fine grained control systems. The kind of thing where you have to set option customer.view_customer.customer_delivery_options.changes.change_customer_home_delivery_flag to true if you want a role to be able to click a checkbox on and off.

There are two main reasons for this:

• Early in my career I helped implement a fine grained system, it took a lot of effort and time. It was never used because configuring the options were too difficult and time consuming. Essentially the system was switched to always be on.
• Secondly, when working in a small company I discovered that people that do the job of dealing with customers, buying stock or arranging short term finance actually did a better job when the IT department didn’t control how they did they worked. Having IT implement “controls” on their systems is like selling a screwdriver that only allows you to turn it in one direction.

Therefore I was very happy to hear Cyndi Mitchell on Thursday talking about the decision not to implement fine level ACL in Mingle. If you record who did what on the system and you make it possible to recover previous revisions of data then you do not need control at level much finer than user and superuser.

Instead you can encourage people to use your system as a business tool and if they decide to use that screwdriver to open paint tins or jam open doors, then good on them.