People vs Systems

On which should you base your department more? On people or on systems? Should you have a large team that works in XLS or should you have just a hand of guys that work with powerful tools.

Both solutions have their advantages and their disadvantages.
Base your work on people:
-the costs will be very high and the time taken to finish a report can increase dramatically because of the lack of axiomatizations
-the things are simple and easily to control. You can communicate easier with people and people can feel responsibility and spot logical mistakes.
-you can became dependent on certain people. If the people leave you loose time and knowledge training other people.
Base your work on systems:
-lowers the costs increases the speed
-you are not dependent on the people's knowledge
-can be come very hard to verify and to follow. You might end up with a very complex system that spits out the report but which nobody knows how it does it.
-can get to be very hard to maintain and to improve

I think we must never go on one side or the other fully. The solution is somewhere in the middle. Don't exaggerate by building the perfect system that does it all. Let the people think because until now they are the only ones that can take logical important decisions. With all that what can be done automatically, make it automatic and keep check points. It is very easy to build a system that gives you the solution. The problem is that if you trust blindly the system you might get errors.