Ask any of your business analysts—even the broader user community at large—and the vast majority will consider spreadsheets essential to do their jobs. Despite decades of trying to marginalize spreadsheets, their use remains very high (at 85 percent). Data leaders who take a hard line on curtailing the use of spreadsheets in their data and analytics estate (and even cast them as “necessary evil”) will soon discover that, like the game “Whac-A-Mole,” spreadsheets will pop up all over the place—even in places they didn’t exist before.
Any strategic data and analytics plan requires a thorough understanding of the value of spreadsheets in business operations. Data leaders need to realize that perceptions about spreadsheets tend to be relative—that is, one person’s “tactical” use of spreadsheets just as easily may be another person’s “strategic” requirement. As such, data and business leaders will require a meeting of the minds that encompasses their potentially conflicting points of view.
Can one use a magic formula to figure out the best mix of products and capabilities to address the critical needs of the business and the data community? In a word, no. The solution is a balancing act that will morph and change over time. And as any organization changes and evolves, so will those needs and desires.
Success in business intelligence (BI) stems from delivering business value, not deploying tools. Data leaders must actively work to amplify or reduce spreadsheet use based on how such use can move their organizations closer to being completely successful with their BI initiatives and make contributions that help create substantial business value. Data leaders should be open to encouraging spreadsheet use when it is the most effective way to enable strategic value creation, and where it maps well to the skills and capabilities of relevant users.
But business users’ requirement to “do something with the data” they see now only in reports and visualizations should not provide carte blanche to do anything and everything they want. Embracing spreadsheets for what they are good at—easily and quickly modeling scenarios, pivoting that data to unlock its dimensionality, and including sanctioned corporate data with other third-party or competitive data—is key to boosting productivity and understanding. Using spreadsheets as clandestine data dumps or for repeatedly cleansing incorrect data that should be “fixed” at the source can often lead to competing versions of the truth, as well as time-consuming efforts that could be fraught with errors. And those challenges are just the start.
Data leaders and their teams should think of spreadsheets as a sandbox for innovation. Observe how business teams wrestle with understanding what makes their organization or processes tick. Encourage and co-innovate with business teams and recommend the best ways to address their analytic needs. Then jointly decide which tools to use so users can best leverage analytics to support achievement of their business goals.
Focus on streamlining repeatable actions—especially when they involve cleaning and manipulating data. The fewer of these actions business analysts must do, the more productive the team will be.
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