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How much does it cost to get an advertisement like this in the WSJ?
what are they advertising?
> Instead, companies are turning to new, cloud-based technologies from Anaplan Inc., Workiva Inc., Adaptive Insights and their competitors.
Indeed Very fast into the article I classified it as advertisment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are upsides to excel in cases like that… The health insurance people of various sorts who use this setup are the ones with domain knowledge. With an excel program, they can (1) understand how it works (2) add to it, modify it (3) create a copy and break it (4) debug it (5) have ideas about how it could work differently… I’m not saying that excel is the tool for the job (sounds like it is definitely not), and th…
> The alternative is often rough. Software projects like this have high failure rates. Getting “requirements” out of users’/clients’ heads and into programmer’s is difficult. It means the standard (natural?) gap between domain knowledge and programming knowledge is restored. That has costs. The alternative doesn't have to have a high failure rate. I was brought in to help reboot their in-house implementation of a pro…
Alternatively you were brought in by management to make cost cutting recommendations - and your solution wasn't cheap enough.
Alternatively the company accounted for the enormous risk of the project succeeding but actually being worse than what they had in place.
You really don't know the politics of this.
Edit: Another alternative is that your plan would have resulted in sufficient job losses that the company was worried that it would demotivate other employees and damage the company more than the cost savings.
Feels like an ad
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I consulted at a health insurance company (a Blue Cross Blue Shield licensee with 1000 employees, 200 IT staff) about 10 years ago, I was absolutely horrified that the system of record for health care plan data was Excel spreadsheets. They had staff who would update the claims processing system based on thousands of spreadsheets. When you called customer service, the CSR app would auto-open the member's plan inf…
There are upsides to excel in cases like that… The health insurance people of various sorts who use this setup are the ones with domain knowledge. With an excel program, they can (1) understand how it works (2) add to it, modify it (3) create a copy and break it (4) debug it (5) have ideas about how it could work differently… I’m not saying that excel is the tool for the job (sounds like it is definitely not), and th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of the centralized systems with even the slickest web GUIs can match Excel's capabilities. You can very easily use Excel as a client to a central database and get the best of both worlds.
Can you easily integrate with externals systems via REST & SOAP? I've done some quick web searches on this topic and have never seen anything that jumped out at me. I know Google Sheets gives you a little bit of this with Javascript embedding but I was searching for something more tightly integrated with Excel or LibreOffice.
The phrases "avoid data silos" and "we want single source of truth" have been used repeatedly about Excel misuse/abuse/overuse for 20+ years. The WSJ story talks about the complaint but not about the underlying tension between data redundancy vs data manipulation. Excel endures because it's the non-programmer's REPL for data. Like a Lisp REPL, using Excel is nimble and has an instant feedback loop. Click "A-Z" to sor…
It wasn't very long ago that I realized that my two decades in IT could be summed up as: making proper applications out of Excel workbooks with feeble macros. I hate Microsoft as much as the next Linux zealot, but dang if they didn't create a world in which I've made a career. Where I'm at now, I'm drowning in opportunities to ameliorate horrific Excel-based workflows, and I'm fairly confident that there's enough work out there to last me until another 20 years to retirement.
> “I don’t want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data telling us,” Mr. Garrett said This! I know this is reality in so many companies that don't have technically educated staff to tell them about more suitable ways to do it. So the teams get data from one department or system, manually transform data (in the editor via sea…
"Executive 1 likes to see the data presented in formats A and B, Executive 2 likes to see it presented in formats C and D, and occasionally E, and Executive 3 will only look at it if you format it as F and cut/paste it to PowerPoint."
So you end up with 20 analysts who all have input, each manually re-formatting their own data in 6 different ways, making sure they all stay in sync. Then someone else collates it all together into 3 different exec-specific presentations, and double checks to make sure they tell approximately the same story. Welcome to life as an office drone!
To replace Excel with software X, you would have to deliver software that would provide the Same kind of flexibilty. That is a very difficult kind of software to develop!
One very basic and powerful aspect of excel is simply the fluidity of the display. You can cram a lot of information onto a single screen, resize and move rows/columns, use colors.
As apposed to a clunky web app interface that has low information density, inflexible data scheme,and the crippled UX of a typical web app.
That's not to say that the example given in the article doesn't point out a real problem. But I wonder if doing some custom UI and re-factoring while building on the current system the users already understand wouldn't be a much more cost effective strategy.
When I see the clunky interfaces that so many workers are saddled with these days, it makes me sad.
How much does it cost to get an advertisement like this in the WSJ?
what are they advertising?
Instead, companies are turning to new, cloud-based technologies from Anaplan Inc., Workiva Inc., Adaptive Insights and their competitors.
Could also be the updates in Excel.