Wanted: A Rules Engine for Excel
James Kwak writes about the role of Excel in the JPMorgan 2012 trading loss After the London Whale trade blew up, the Model Review Group discovered that the model had not been automated and found several other errors. Most spectacularly, “After subtracting the old rate from the new rate, the spreadsheet divided by their sum […]
Worse Than Drugs, Booze and Nicotine — Why Can’t Procurement Shake the Excel Addiction? (Part 2)
I reckon that I personally spend between one and two hours per day in Excel, and that’s without doing any active sourcing projects anymore. Back when I was directly involved with sourcing events and the product planning associated with rolling out new technologies around them, I was probably using Excel for 3-4 hours per day. I’m not alone. CombineNet’s recent study looking at the Excel addiction in corporate procurement teams found similar high-usage patterns. In looking at 100 organizations in April and May of 2011, CombineNet found…
Shrinking Balls
In my last post, I wrote about the sentiment analysis of the Super Bowl and how brands are impacted by the real-time stream. That stream stimulates a Mean Girls phenomenon that causes people to be more passionate and start to bully as they become more popular. I know some analysts…
Smartsheet and collaboration
I took a briefing with Smartsheet yesterday. It’s a type of collaboration software but it operates in a more textual way than the social media based tools on the market like Facebook or its business counterpart, Chatter from Salesforce.com. What’s immediately striking about the product is its spreadsheet metaphor. Everyone connected with the product will […]
Collaboration Tools : SharePoint = Enterprise Apps : Excel
As I sat through an overview of one of the latest collaboration tools on the market, a product called Spaces from nGenera, I began to have a deja-vu all over again moment. The discussion centered around the unique value proposition that nGenera was putting forth in the product, and, while the arguments behind them were […]
Microsoft Plays Where’s Waldo? With BI – Good Idea
In April, I was critical of the BI messaging I heard from Microsoft – as told, it was long on benefit adjectives and short on architectural clarity. But things have changed since then, and the Combined Tech Ed/Business Intelligence Conference made that very clear. Do I see more clarity because I now know more of […]
Who’s to blame for “Excel hell?”
My blogging mojo had left the building for a while, but for better or worse it returned today. When I speak to enterprise software vendors they often moan about Excel. They say it is not secure, and that most spreadsheets contain errors. They preach about the dangers of information silos, of decisions made on old […]
The Top 10 Trends for 2010 in Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Performance Management
In the wake of the long-running massive industry consolidation in the Enterprise Software industry that reached its zenith with the acquisitions of Business Intelligence market leaders Hyperion, Cognos, and Business Objects in 2007, one could certainly have been forgiven for being less than optimistic about the prospects of innovation in the Analytics, Business Intelligence, and […]
FieldGlass Doubles Down on BI and Contingent Spend (Part 2)
In my first column tackling the latest from Chicago-based VMS provider Fieldglass last week, I provided an overview of a number of the gaps they recently filled from a reporting, analytics, visualization and benchmarking perspective in their solution…
