When business-intelligence platforms reach full maturity, the predictions go, that'll be the end of desktop spreadsheet analytics in enterprises.
Turns out, though, there's probably more corporate urgency in finding low-gravity ink pens for offices on the moon.
In a recent report, Forrester Research principal analyst Boris Evelson concludes that Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, despite security weaknesses and IT management headaches, will never be fully excised for business-intelligence purposes. Despite core data-integrity issues with using spreadsheets in BI-audits reveal up to 90 percent of documents contain inaccuracies-spreadsheets have been around too long and become too well-integrated in business processes to decouple them and the resident data from the analytics engines.
Evelson cited a consulting-firm report that "several business- process reengineering projects at major banks identified more than 1,500 spreadsheets that were closely integrated with a financial reporting process." Despite higher operational-risk parameters, the risk to capital apparently scares banks even more: Calculations for pricing and cost allocations have to be changed too quickly and frequently for the IT department to manage embedded calculations in enterprise applications.
Vendors, meanwhile, have inadvertently cemented the use of spreadsheets by building functional workarounds to the legacy spreadsheet. As centralized document management, online analytics processing and other tools came aboard, Excel add-ons tucked spreadsheets further into the BI fold by bridging source data to BI/analytics user interfaces. Enterprises have thus never found the incentive to fully kick spreadsheets out of the nest, and "unfortunately, because these tools and approaches made it easier for end-users to use and multiply, they further contributed to spreadsheet management issues," says Evelson.
Enterprises have tried to counter spreadsheet "chaos" with two approaches: managed controls, which scrutinize documents for compliance and auditing; and outright control, by permitting only certain functions and macros in limited-use spreadsheets.
So instead of continuing the hunt for the Excel-free solution, Evelson writes, the approach for business-intelligence professionals now is to embrace spreadsheets-and bridge the gap between usage and management by creating a "holistic" integration for BI and spreadsheet-management products. The blueprint includes dividing the business-process spreadsheets from those used for "what-if" and modeling practices and applying managed functions only to the mission-critical items while audits handle the governance of non-critical ones.
The BI industry is also adapting to the belief that Microsoft will continue to add and improve Excel enterprise functions, such as fine-grained collaboration, next-generation access/version control and additional bidirectional links to BI rules engines. Evelson says large BI platform vendors like Cognos and Business Objects will also maintain spreadsheet components in products and position them for the convergence of data process-centric intelligence.
