Quite a few organizations reside in Spreadsheet Hell. It is where they end up when they commit the sin of hiring intelligent people and then force them to use business applications that “suck like a singularity.” Naturally, if business apps suck in such a singular manner, intelligent staff will work around them rather than with them. In all probability they will use the most obvious tool available (the spreadsheet) to capture and manipulate the data that really did need managing and they may even use the spreadsheet in conjunction with email to distribute such data, update it, analyze it and publish graphs of it.

Of course this alternatively evolved system will also suck mightily, but it will have the advantage that it gets the job done. Now if you’re thinking; “no metadata, no testing regime, no back-up, no recovery, no consistency checking, no documentation, what would Mr Sarbanes and his good friend Mr Oxley think? etc.”, I get where you’re coming from. But remember where we are here. We’re in the place of eternal IT damnation that’s hotter than a hill of habaneros and ruled over by that infernal Microsoft dancing paperclip (long known to be an agent of the devil).

Remarkably, there is a Get-out-of-hell-for-a-reasonable-fee card, which can be played by organizations that are condemned to this dark and dismal world (see OpenSpan: SOA on the Desktop) but my belief is that the organizations, who were consigned to Spreadsheet Hell, long ago abandoned all hope of coherent IT and will simply think such avenues of escape illusory – another trick of the Devil.

Spreadsheet Purgatory

We needn’t spend too much time reflecting on the perpetual IT torment to which the denizens of spreadsheet hell are condemned. We’ll do better to reflect on our own situation, which for most organizations can be accurately described as Spreadsheet Purgatory. Our IT environments are impure; we have sinned, but we are not irretrievably lost.

Spreadsheets are damn useful. Admittedly they would be more useful if the spreadsheet creators had seen fit to properly manage the data they contained, in a collective way, or even provided a coherent way to allow incremental data management to be added. That’s a bit like saying; it would have been nice if cars had been designed to be hybrids from the start. It’s true, but it makes no difference now.

I can think of many instances where spreadsheets have been used to good effect; creating make-shift systems where previously there was nothing. They get used in almost every area of an organization. They abound in insurance companies and banks. They pervade all areas of clerical management. They grow and evolve within Finance Departments. I’ve seen them used almost everywhere in computer operations. And in most instances they exist because, right now, there’s no alternative.

The Escape From Spreadsheet Purgatory

Spreadsheet based processes, when they haven’t grown like a cancer around applications that simply don’t work properly, normally indicate opportunities for business process automation. The spreadsheet-based process may even be doing 80% of what could be done, but if it were added as a component in an end-to-end business process and the associated data made available to other applications then most, if not all, of the list of defects (no metadata, no testing regime, no back-up, no recovery, no consistency checking, etc.) would be rectified.

And that’s the point of this posting. There is nothing wrong per se with the spreadsheet. It is, in fact, a wonderful end user software tool with its ability to organize and manipulate numerical data, analyze data, represent data visually and manage data. It’s all about using it correctly – and if, for the sake of expedience, it is used to develop make-shift business processes, that’s fine too – as long as those processes are recognized as makeshift.

The enthusiasm for compliance that has emerged in recent years is starting to gradually surface the spreadsheet problem. For many years the use of spreadsheets to run informal systems has been pretty much invisible. However, there is no reason that the situation cannot be managed productively – unless of course, you have been flung into the outer darkness of spreadsheet hell.