Nick Booth wonders what’s so bad about spreadsheets anyway?
While researching the issue of network planning, we were told some worrying news. Some communications service providers (CSPs) still use spreadsheets to project manage their capacity changes.
Recently, I’ve heard the same dire warning about IT operation managers, who have been using Excel when working out how to schedule all their IT jobs. One bank, according to another scare story, was found to be using spreadsheets to manage the settings for the firewalls between all the hundreds of servers that were multiplying under the new virtualisation regime.
All these situations were reported as if they were passages from the Book of Revelations. Spreadsheets are routinely cast as the devils own business systems. Too cheap and too easy. Presumably, when the devil walks among us, he will create a file with 666 rows.
Then another report came out, this time from YouGov, warning that spreadsheet calculations still represent up to £38bn of British private sector investment decisions per year. Sometimes, the report warned, inaccurate information is put into those spreadsheets. Projecting from this, there was a report in a newspaper warning that these spreadsheet errors will be the cause of the next financial crisis.
With almost choreographed panic, yet another report emerged. An outfit called F1F9 released a sensational white paper, called Capitalism’s Dirty Secret, which warns that billions of pounds are at risk from financial errors arising from incorrect figures typed into spreadsheets.
By the time I was beginning to feel a bit sorry for the classic accounting tool. Whenever everyone gangs up on one person, or thing, you can’t help feeling sorry for them and questioning the rule of the mob.
The first doubt that comes to mind is: what’s so bad about spreadsheets anyway? How come they are being blamed for human error?
Surely, if people type the wrong information into a cell, then they can do the same with a network planning system. Neither does the simple spreadsheet make anyone take up fraud.
Secondly, the sponsors of all these studies are invariably companies who sell management systems, so it’s no wonder they want to disrupt the status quo.
Which brings us on to the most pertinent question. If spreadsheets are so terrible, how come everyone likes using them? Most companies have already paid through the nose to give everyone in the company a licensed copy of Microsoft Excel. So they might as well get some use out of it. The fact that everyone wants to use this system has two other important benefits. There will be no training bill and you won’t have to wait six months until you can get started. Unlike a new IT system, which never comes in on time or under budget and they are usually about as intuitive to use as the Hadron Colllider.
Spreadsheets then, are a good starting point. If only we could tailor them to be more productive, and iron out some of the faults and the bottlenecks, they’d do exactly what you want them to do. Isn’t that how IT is supposed to be installed? The best systems take an existing process and work around it. The worst system vendors are the ones who expect the customer to work around them.
There is some good news at last. A number of vendors have emerged who have created ways to turbo charge spreadsheets and surpass all their limitations. Broadwalk Tech, and two start ups, Vena Solutions and Synapse, all claim to have built on the foundations of the spreadsheet and layer on all the sophistication and robustness one would expect of a management system.
“The idea is to give user the best of both worlds,” says Synapse founder Brian Donnelly. The ease of use of a popular package with the robustness and sophistication of a database.
So if you visit a CSP network planner and notice that they seem to be working on a spreadsheet, don’t be alarmed. They could be ahead of the game.
