There is a strong notion that we are still using spreadsheet technology that has largely ignored the needs of the business user. The truth that still prevails is the maximum population of business individuals still bank on this old medium for running their business. It’s high time to detain the spreadsheet practice and its add-ons as well. Let us evaluate some points supporting the statement:
- Data is sourced from many systems: Joining disparate data sets in order to have the whole story aboard is the only way by which true insights can be procured, which in turn would provide the organization with actionable insights. There are examples validating the above-claimed point. Most of the organization’s data is collected from transactions, flat files, CRM applications, financial applications etc.,
One of the top US regional banks recently executed an analytics application having 43 disparate data sources
A global leasing organization resolved a complicated report by merging seven systems across the world, which were transacting in 24 different countries
- Organizational Change is Constant: Out-of-date query tools have worked around the problem for decades by handling hierarchies and cubes which supposedly represent the managing tactics of an organization. The difficulty that gets introduced by a simple organizational change, though results in a surfeit of IT work resulting in frustration by the business. One another examples show a customer who built an analytics sourced from an Oracle general ledger and cleared eight months of backlogged projects in less than seven days. This was possible by the creation of a dynamic hierarchy table allowing an analyst to either adjust or change the hierarchy on the fly.
- Drilling to Details is Mandatory: Pre-aggregation of data for reducing the row numbers was a method that was developed decades ago, allowing for the fact that historically there were way too many rows of data to handle. This is supposed to be the vital reason for the creation of massive spreadsheets and storing this detail outside of IT. It is easy and quick to aggregate millions of records, and drill through them in a business intelligence tool by which all transactions are made available to the analyst.
The data visualization tool is a modern technique to replace the spreadsheet visualization. It gives you the ability to automate report refresh, drill down, join disparate data sources, handle huge data and analytics by blending machine learning with R/Python.
