“Have you seen the new reports in Hyperion?”
“I know, they’re awesome, now how do you get them in Excel?”
Organizations, that have large scary IT departments, spend millions of dollars a year trying to throw a deadbolt over their data, while the business users (to a person) want that data in Excel, essentially giving them the power to change a six to a nine, thereby making a so-so quarter, rock-solid!
What most of companies have done is to allow users the Excel option, but keeping the lock on the data, by controlling updates to the original data source – problem solved – ah – not really.
I have been working for very large investment banks for almost twenty years (when I say large think of the richest and then the second richest) and the amount of input that Excel has on those numbers is astounding; only outdone by the amount of hatred IT has for Excel. The common approach is to slowly work through each process, assess the risk and automate away pesky Excel and the power it gives users. Sound good – yes? No.
Here is why. You still have no control on Excel. You have no methods and no one central department that oversees its use, its automation, its power to correct, modify and/or destroy important company data. Users are going to keep using Excel for important tasks, let’s say you move the General Ledger uploads off to a centralized application, pulling data from your big data warehouse. I am taking an educated guess, that in the best of companies, eighty percent of that data has at one time or another been in an Excel spreadsheet with zero control. Sure IT is going to argue that can’t be the case, but they don’t know, they are too far removed from the user’s process.
You know who would know, your centralized VBA development group. This group gets there before IT. They work directly with the users. They code quickly, have a QA process, and stay in communication with IT who now hates them slightly less then they hate Microsoft.
Of course the programs that they write utilize the power of VBA, and they can quickly assess the best approach, language and time investment on a problem by problem basis. They would employ AGILE and RAD techniques, but mostly they are a user facing development group with the ability to quell a raging epidemic of bad data. In my years of VBA programming I am certain that I have saved my clients millions of dollars over the years, through corrected mistakes as well as time savings. Included in those time savings is the fact that the VBA programs that IT loathes, serve them well as a prototype for the modules or applications they need to build two years later.
Finally, it is highly short-sighted and foolish for any company not to centralize their middle and back office VBA, Excel, Access efforts. This is your final data, data that will go into your disclosures, that will feed executive decisions and that will let you know if there is a problem. As long as your users are plugging data into cells unchecked, they are eroding the foundation of your company,
Dan Paul is an independent VBA consultant with sixteen years of experience with fortune one hundred companies. He has created and developed hundreds of applications as well as formed and managed VBA groups on an international scale. He can be reached by clicking the link Below
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