Written by Dr. Pallab Chatterjee
Excel owns the real enterprise data at the employee desktop!
Despite billions of dollars spent across enterprises large and small in all geographies, employees continue to use Excel as their personal decision-making tool. This continues unabated through many generations of IT systems.
The ERP era in the 1990s was supposed to create a single system that would be used by all functions. It was heralded, implemented, and used as the IT backbone of enterprises. As these expensive new systems were installed, the IT management community instituted strong policies to make these systems stable and highly available. These policies made the system rigid and set up business processes that worked when the system was installed. Changes and updates were decided by IT management that prioritized and sorted change requests from business.
This is the “Excel Bypass” movement that has endured generations of IT applications.
Business needs and processes evolve rapidly, and employees were under pressure to operate at the speed of business. They learned to export data from ERP to their Excel sheets and bypass the use of the enterprise system because they wanted a personalized way to use data to make their own business decisions. Excel became the new “arithmetic” skill that was necessary for most jobs, and employees felt empowered to create their own reports and make decisions based on them. They did not want to wait for IT to respond.
Enterprise data warehouses, big data and analytics, and data lakes were put in place by IT management to address the needs for “personalization” of information needed to make business decisions. However, Excel Bypass continues to defy the attempts of CIO’s to get employees to use the systems they have put in place. Click below to know how much Excel Bypass exists in your company.
CLICK HERE to know how much Excel Bypass exists in your company.
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Finally, Excel and IT systems can live in harmony!
