The risk of allowing end users to develop their own applications is decentralization of control. End-user developed applications may not be subject to an independent outside review by systems analysts and are not created in the context of a formal development methodology. These applications may lack appropriate standards, controls, and quality assurance procedures. Moreover, when end users create their own applications and files, private information systems may proliferate in which data are largely uncontrolled. These systems may contain the same information, but end-user applications may update and define the data in different ways. Thus, determining the location of data and ensuring data consistency become more difficult because the applications are difficult to integrate.