The love-hate relationship with spreadsheets chronicled by my esteemed colleague Joe McKendrick and others is both a symptom and harbinger of many of the challenges presented by those pursuing or considering business intelligence (BI) or business analytics (BA) efforts. So I thought I'd stick my ladle in the soup and muck things up a bit further. All in service to you, the beleaguered reader, of course.
1. Blaming spreadsheets for lack of success with BI, BA, or anything related is like stiffing your server because the restaurant's kitchen screwed up your meal. From what I've read, many spreadsheets contain no formulas at all, and an uncomfortably large percentage of those that do contain formulas contain errors. Estimates of error-containing spreadsheets range from 20 to 50 percent, depending on who you ask (and what error-reducing solution they're touting).
2. Spreadsheets aren't going away because…well, because they just aren't. They're familiar and comfortable, even to those who only know enough about them to use them as glorified (albeit more neatly formatted) scratchpads. (Anybody remember the promise of the "paperless office?" Well, when I was a Yankee Group analyst in the 1970s, our august founder, Howard Anderson, was fond of saying we'd see paperless bathrooms first. Perhaps frighteningly, between hot-air hand driers and the "hands-off" commodes now found in Japan and elsewhere, he turns out to have been right.)
3. It's not the spreadsheet, it's what's in it. That's true for the data being entered or imported, and for the formulas being used to manipulate that data. This means that there must be well defined, consistent, and enforceable policies and processes in place to govern how business-critical spreadsheets (and the formulas and information they contain) get managed, populated, secured, shared, and used. In other words, they are critical intellectual property (IP), and must be managed as such, across their entire respective lifecycles.
4. Spreadsheets are likely to play larger, not smaller, roles in BA, BI, and related efforts at many sizes and types of enterprises for some time to come. As BA, BI, and related efforts spread from business analysts and other specialists to "civilian" business decision-makers, spreadsheets will be one of the most widely used tools to facilitate communication between and among those groups.
Given all of the above, Cognos and other vendors are doing no more than responding to customer demand (and the inevitable) by increasing interoperability with and support of spreadsheets as BA and BI tools. In fact, the smartest BA, BI, and process management and optimization vendors will quickly include features that help customers surround those spreadsheets with the policies, practices, and processes necessary to make them reliable, secure resources. Those features may range from automation and validation software features to consulting services – but whatever form they take, there will likely be significant demand for them for some time to come. And don't even get me started about the "unstructured data" hiding in plain sight on all of those sticky notes…
Leave a comment