Management abhors a vacuum. That’s why when there are no workable information systems in place, spreadsheets and email chains spring up to fill the gap. Anyone who has tried to tame one of these organic sneaker-nets knows how hard they are to uproot.
One of the reasons they are so resilient is that they work pretty well for the users involved. The user interface is familiar to all of them, and writing a spreadsheet is a heck of a lot easier than writing reports in crystal and entering data in a disconnected and unwieldy forms interface.
The downsides for the larger business are, of course, the reason why senior management typically tries to eradicate theses ad hoc systems is that their business data is stuck, unversioned and unverified, in employees inboxes and file-systems. They break down as they grow and as spreadsheets are invariably modified, often in incompatible directions, in response to changing and growing business requirements.
The response is to implement a variety of replacement solutions: Knowledge Management Systems, data entry and reporting solutions, work-flow and OPM systems. These solutions tend to be expensive, slow to implements, and ultimately unsatisfying replacements.
Why not embrace the spreadsheet and integrate it with the KM/work-flow/reporting systems? Collaborative spreadsheets, with roll-ups, entitlements, work-flow — the killer App of the AJAX era? There are already a few AJAX spreadsheets — Num Sum has a good one — and in a blast from the past, Dan Briklin, one of the creators of VisiCalc, is working on WikiCalc. Don’t get too excited. WikiCalc doesn’t have any of those necessary things — work-flow, roll-ups, reporting — that would make this a killer app.
Bit even if the perfect solution comes along in a few months, that’s no guarantee of success. One secret to implementing information systems that are successfully adopted is this: eliminate the competition. In the case of a collaborative spreadsheet system this means eliminating email attachments, desktop spreadsheet applications, shared file-stores, etc. The AJAX collaborative spreadsheet may be a little ways away from being able to replace the current desktop solutions, but their time may come.
At any rate, these office apps are unlikely to be Microsoft’s Pearl Harbor or anyone elses.
The thing about spread sheets is that ultimately they are just a file. They will never solve big problems only small problems across small organisations or teams. They will never be a central repository of information in larger organisations…actually let me re-phrase that, they SHOULD never be a central repository of information in larger organisations.
Interesting article. I agree that enhanced features around spreadsheets will be greatly appreciated by many users. Spreadsheets are to end-users what scripting languages like BASIC or Ruby are to programmers, a hideous unstructured untype-safe mess that can be grown organically. Very seductive to the untrained, and as pointed out by Craig above, generally unmaintainable at enterprise level. Which is not to say such features aren’t enormously desirable or valuable to a firm and the people used to working with spreadsheets: most projects within an enterprise aren’t enterprise scale, and don’t need to be.
What seems to be missing from your article is an explanation of why AJAX is useful for delivering this. Other than the potential “no-installation” benefit (which is of less importance in enterprises where the software platform is centrally controlled), what does AJAX offer that you can’t do better using traditional PC-hosted client apps and a central server?
Regards,
Tony