I have been following this same argument conversation on the litsupport listserv as well, but I thought Tom O’Connor has summed it up pretty well in the following post:

There has been a fascinating thread on the Lit Support ListServ this week that was started by the following post.  “Why is EDD and Data Processing So Expensive, why can’t IT or my secretary do this ? I know that we have all been faced with this so I am wondering if anyone  can point me to a few good references, as I want to write a document that the average person can read and understand. This will help from having to explain this 300 times a year…”