Microsoft Excel: friend or foe?

Modern business intelligence (BI) tools impress even the late adopters and the most sceptical of us out there. New BI tools are even being informally labelled as “Google for your Data”.

Enter business intelligence tools in Google and you get 15 million results. Type data and you get 1.3 billion results. Type Microsoft Excel and you get 46.9 million results.

This question must be asked though. “How much longer can key decision-makers rely on Excel as a key tool in their decision-making process?”

Some years back the concept of the 'real-time enterprise' was first launched into the IT world. Well I believe there is another enterprise, the “Excel Enterprise”.

The Excel Enterprise is an enterprise:

* Where Excel is used for key ledger bound financial information either as source of the calculation or as a key part in the process.

* Where key business decisions are made based on data mostly calculated within Excel.

* Where there is a nagging thought that Excel has started to become your ledger.

* Where the ledger has become the storing ground for balances and totals and the detail sits in the world's most used sub-ledger - Excel.

* The need for urgent on the spot data analysis from a disparate technology landscape.
* Margins for error in decision-making has decreased dramatically.
* IT landscapes are still managed in silos.
* Details are still managed outside of the formal ERP system so that the truth can be modified before delivered.
* Business intelligence/analytics/reporting is all still confusing to the user community. With excel you just extract, find an ExcelHead and off you go.
* Business users often don't have the time to learn the appropriate tools and so go back to Excel.
* Deploying tools without taking enough time to understand the real problem.
* Focusing on implementing tools and not on managing the information.
* CIOs and CTOs are often both caught up in the application war and data becomes the true victim.

Over the years, we have seen organisations operating at certain levels of analytics. Starting at level one, which is characterised by no analytics to speak of. Most data is on multiple spreadsheets. Too much time is spent collecting and formatting data for reporting purposes. Ending on level five, where the enterprise has a fully integrated system performing analytics behind the scenes. Reports are easy to run and change to new business requirements. More time is spent actually making decisions on the data than preparing it.

Decision-makers in today's new economy have fewer margins for error. This translates into decision-makers needing quality information and needing to be able to create several views of the data quickly. In the pursuit of this, tactical solutions are often chosen and in many cases this is Excel.

So if you are desperate for a quick and dirty, rather get in a top implementation company to tactically deploy a strategic tool.

Ever wanted to get a budget forecast and found yourself cursing your Excel Enterprise? In multiple industries across the world we find an increasing number of companies focusing more on the increasing legislative requirements, the need for accurate on-time information and visible audit trails. We are finding more organisations putting strong IT systems in place for core business processes and moving away from the Excel enterprise. One example we found was an organisation using 40 accountants to reconcile the single version of the truth - their ledger - and their Excel Enterprise and this for only one core business process.

The saying: “What gets measured gets managed” is still as true as ever. Organisations will always need a strong vision to drive them, a clear mission statement to give them focus. Objectives must be clearly defined to push the organisation towards its vision, and like with any objective, it must be measured and tracked. To ensure this all gets delivered, process, people and technology must be all aligned.

So in trying to answer the question “Is Excel friend or foe”, I offer this view:

Excel as a tool to create spreadsheets... well the fact is it's brilliant for that. It has a great user interface, it's easy to learn and use. There are vast uses for it and it is commonly used and understood. So if you use it as a spreadsheet to do spreadsheet work then it's a great choice. If you try and turn Excel into an extension of your ERP, or even worse, you try and turn it into an ERP tool itself, then it becomes public enemy number one.

I congratulate those organisations across industries and across the globe that are taking their information seriously. What many forget in the fast paced world of IT is that IT is an acronym for information technology. Most have gotten caught up in frenzy with technology and forgotten about the reason technology is even there in the first place, and that is information. You can have the best software you want. The best skills in the market, the best use of SOA in your industry, you can have more cubes than any other, but if you don't make the health of your information a key to your organisation's success, you can spend all day everyday making the best possible decisions with data that might as well be from another company.