Business is all about process. Process is the container inside of which everything business happens. It makes things traceable, repeatable, versioned, controlled. This is the tightly structured, schematic landscape of IT. Business applications are built, live inside of, and facilitate process, and IT rests easy knowing that. Process is without rogues and nonconformists.
Enter Excel. Like process, Excel spreadsheets are all about control – loads of it. Spreadsheets offer power carte blanche to manipulate, organize, analyze, and present data. Trouble is, for many or most businesses, Excel is off the grid.
For decades, business users have embraced spreadsheets as the go-to tool for nearly all tasks concerning data, but because they’re so infrequently the denizens of IT’s tightly hemmed process, they’re something of a technology faux pas. What’s worse, the reason that business folks like them is, indeed, the reason that IT hates them: they give business users keys to drive right out of process.
Spreadsheets give users a certain sense of ownership, letting them make both form and function changes without navigating any “draconian” development channels. This is the very nature of ad-hoc analysis. This also gives rise to a sort of homebrew attitude, where Excel users create seemingly quite complex structures that take the place of applications, which otherwise would be situated within a business process. Instead, they’re outsiders – weeds in the garden.
The degree to which IT hates spreadsheets is incalculable and, if one adopts an IT perspective, understandable. Versioning is out the window. Since Excel is working as an endpoint most of the time, there’s no real traceability or transparency available to technology teams. Being disconnected from process means human error is a major problem and goes unchecked – possibly being passed around an organization as spreadsheets proliferate. And then there’s that proliferation, which aside from being copious raises major security concerns.
These issues seem irreconcilable. Are they?
Absolutely not. The first thing to realize is that IT and business teams talk about spreadsheets in a different language. For the latter they’re a tool – a good one – and for the former they’re a liability. So there has to be a glossary between the two, a way to translate or agree on common syntax. IT has to understand spreadsheets as a schematic, and business has to understand how they fit into the process ecosystem.
When there are visible, traceable relationships between spreadsheets and their source data, between spreadsheets and themselves, and between spreadsheets and their users, then spreadsheets begin to look more like processes than invasive species. They become a layer on top of a structured data environment – in IT language, an interface. Now we can add security measures to grant or repeal access to certain data stores, a change log that monitors when changes to data are made and by whom, an entire vocabulary for IT to embrace.
This isn’t just a dream for IT, either. Whereas our former conception of spreadsheets had us manipulating and saving them, in this new world we work inside of the spreadsheet as normal, but its relationship with data sources means we’re actually working with the data sources through the spreadsheet. It’s that IT word again: interfacing. Saving and emailing Excel files becomes obsolete, as does copy-pasting, and the potential for mistakes diminishes significantly.
This is all accomplished by a shift in mindset between both IT and business teams. I hesitate to call it a give and take, because neither side of the equation has to sacrifice. In fact, the problem of spreadsheets is solved by positioning them in the overlap between the business and IT worlds, effectively pulling a business tool into the process world without taking it from the business world at all.
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Spreadsheets have been the de facto standard for data analysis in virtually every field concerning data – which is virtually every field – largely thanks to the amount of control and flexibility they give to users. They’re not going anywhere, and the problems they pose for IT are completely solvable. Indeed the benefits of solving them are substantial across all business units. Security, accuracy, functionality, and on and on.
But getting there takes a certain amount of translation between business teams and IT teams, because while they’re using the same words, they’re speaking a different language entirely. In order for spreadsheets to win (and everyone else along with them) we’ve got to find the common ground, understand the glossary of terms that our teammates use to think and talk about the problems we all share, and then get on the same page (or is it workbook?).
Bill Erickson is Interject’s communications manager
For more info on Interject’s solutions, email communications@gointerject.com