Many people active in analytical CRM got used to the situation of sitting on the fence between marketing and BI technology / DWH. In many organisations marketing with its particular and extensive analytical needs created dedicated teams assuring a large autonomy. These people sometimes ask the BI teams to adapt the DWH and sometimes cannot wait and help themselves. The aCRM analysts are mostly driven by the analytical results and relatively short project cycles. They will e.g. process additional intermediary transformations with the tools they know and have at hand. IT architecture, standards and policies are considered as of secondary priority. Let the IT folks take care of that.
Over time their sandbox databases, development pools and other workspaces become crucial components of the aCRM set of data sources, suddenly requiring enterprise support, maintenance and reliability. However, due to the historically grown anarchical structure only very adventurous IT departments would be willing to conclude an SLA for such systems, which are hard to disentangle and maintain.
At first sight there seems to be no escape from such a road block. Depending on the balance of power, either BI will insist on a solid evolution of its systems and even enforce an internal monopoly, which imposes their rhythm on all internal customers. Or the power users extend the corporate BI systems with the many little things they need and value while progressing steadily towards an unmanageable situation. Compliance becomes a sheer nightmare. Collaboration between marketing and IT often unpleasant.
Either way, be it the freedom for power users approach or the IT rules approach, it is not sustainable. Flexible processes need to enable the business to obtain results at a speed acceptable for them and handle the transition between prototyping systems towards solid ones whenever appropriate. Throwaway extensions which have been used once or twice and left alone afterwards, should be flagged as such, archived and phased out of the workspace in order to avoid that such dead bodies prevent you from taking care of the extensions still being used.