There - I got your attention! Don’t worry I won’t take Excel away from you! - I don’t have anything against it- it’s a powerful tool, but it’s more that I accuse its’ users of relying on it for the wrong purpose. We are forced to use Excel as a tool to gather data instead of using it to make informed decisions.

Our organisations are to blame. Rather than build databases to provide us with centrally stored data facilitating sharing and collaboration, they force us to build up and protect private stashes of data in personal Excel models.

We often have to re-key information from different places or at best copy and paste it from different sources. Sometimes you have to buy a colleague coffee and a doughnut to have access to ‘their’ data. Interfaces between disparate automated and manual systems are sadly lacking and the bulk of our time is wasted gathering and collating the data. We spend most of our time in data gathering when in fact we should be spending our time in Analysis and Decision Support – making informed decisions based on what the data tells us.

The winner of the Corporation Game is awarded to the creator of most sophisticated Excel model which sports the latest snapshot of the company’s data. This leads to a territorial protectionism – we are individuals proud of ‘owning’ information by merit of having spent hours collecting and manipulating it. Rather, our organisations should be responsible for the central collection and storage of this information and we should be proud of the decisions we make using this information.

Depending on Excel to pull together data has further consequences: by the time we have manipulated and crunched the data, our decisions are often academic: the organisation has moved on since that snapshot was taken. Secondly, in the manipulation and collection process the data is often corrupted which means we are using the wrong data to make our decisions. Lastly, we may not have access to all the required data so we end up estimating or inferring important elements. So despite the effort of pulling the data together its integrity is still doubtful.

Can you imagine a world where our organisation had all its data in a central, fully accessible store? A world where we could be confident of reliably transforming this data into information and making sensible informed decisions for the greater good of our organisations’ overall goals (and our careers)? With all the advances in on-line database platforms, this isn’t a tall order. Keep your eyes posted - this blog will reveal all!