Stop us when this starts to sound familiar:
A potential new deal is introduced to your company and you're suddenly in charge of making it a success. But as is true in many of these situations, there's now what feels like an endless pit of new data that you have to make sense of - data that simply didn't exist before.
Client demographics. Process flows. Sales information. Service requests. The list goes on and on. Your own IT people simply don't have the hours in a day - nor the resources - to respond. Needing a quick fix, you open Microsoft Excel, create a new spreadsheet and start typing away. Crisis averted, right?
Not quite.
As the new project begins to grow in size and scope, you add a few more tabs to your spreadsheet to try to make sense of all the data you're creating. You may even try to create entirely new spreadsheets to manage all the different types of data you're working with. Suddenly you've got one for new orders. Another one for tracking service requests. At first, it seems like you're able to hold everything together.
But of course, it never lasts.
Soon, you realize that to fully address service orders, you need to be able to see information about the associated client at the same time. You begin cutting and pasting data, which suddenly makes everything you've already created that much more complicated and convoluted.
Managers from other departments start asking for specific information that exists entirely within your spreadsheets, so you start sending copies of those files around the office. Almost instantly, you learn why this is a bad idea - entire portions of your beautifully-styled spreadsheets get erased because others aren't quite as proficient at Excel as you are. You try to be the "Spreadsheet Traffic Cop" and prevent people from making incorrect edits, but now you find yourself in charge of adding everyone's changes to a master document and redistributing it. It quickly becomes a full-time job - which is an issue, since you already have one of those.
Then, duplicated data begins to rear its ugly head. The moment a client changes their contact information, you now have to update it in 12 different places. If you can't remember all the various places you copied that data to, there could be more instances out there that you're unaware of - meaning people are acting on incorrect information without knowing it.
Now, organizational leadership is starting to ask for insight into how that new business project is going. It's essentially impossible to offer it without sinking an entire day into cutting and pasting - a process that is equal parts time-consuming and error-prone.
This, in essence, is why spreadsheets are far more trouble than they're worth.
One unfortunate trend - especially with organizations of a certain level - is that employees begin to patch together "solutions" based only on the tools they're already familiar with. Microsoft Excel, Word and Access are major examples of this. They don't have to get approval to do so because everybody "knows" them, they don't have to request additional funding and the IT department doesn't necessarily have to do anything all.
That last point is particularly important, as internal IT departments are quite often overworked and underfunded on the best of days. They spend so much of their time stopping problems that they can't really devote a lot of their attention to propelling the business forward. Therefore, employees have to deal with those small, department-specific solutions themselves.
These types of cobbled-together solutions may be okay in the early days when there is very little data being pumped into them, but this almost never lasts. As the amount of information that a department is dealing with grows, the seams begin to show immediately.
These "solutions" become incredibly cumbersome to work with until they get downright unwieldy. Eventually, they don't help anyone complete their work - they actually start holding them back.
To be fair to the situation, spreadsheets do certainly bring with them a fair amount of value.
They let us put together columns of numbers and labels as we see fit. They can do complex calculations. They offer summations, data analysis and even, in some situations, forecasting.
What they're not ideal for, however, is storing data, managing the relationships between different types of data, and getting business intelligence into the hands of the people who need it when they need it the most.
At Keene Systems, one example of this idea in action took the form of a client lays gas pipelines. A foreman working on a job in the field fills out a piece of paper that then gets sent back to those at the home office. The information on that paper then gets into a series of spreadsheets, some of which is then entered again into the accounting system.
With this type of process, preparing an invoice at the end of a project to facilitate payment doesn't take days - it takes weeks. Organizational leaders are never really sure what is going on with a project. Data is spread across so many spreadsheets and is contained in so many repositories that reporting isn't just difficult - in a lot of situations, it's literally impossible.
In terms of spreadsheets vs custom-built, web-based applications, there are a number of important differences to be aware of in terms of how they manage and extract value from data. These include things like:
Off the shelf solutions do bring value to an organization... provided that your processes are supported fully by whatever a random programmer had in mind when they were designing the solution in the first place.
Remember that off the shelf software was built to have the broadest appeal possible - it was a Swiss Army Knife, so to speak. It was something intended to be sold across a number of industries and in hindsight, that doesn't make it a "solution" at all.
It makes it a "Jack of All Trades, Master of None."
Some pre-existing solution might solve 2/3rds of your problems, sure - but that final third may be a major blow to your productivity and your ability to operate.
Likewise, applications that were designed to be as generic as possible tend to have what is called "feature bloat" - meaning you're paying for a lot of features that you'll never end up actually using.
Future expandability? Probably not going to happen. Integration with your other programs? Not likely. So, while you're solving short-term problems, you're creating new long-term issues - the exact opposite of the situation you want to be in.
All of this is why software outsourcing and customized software is absolutely the solution that most people are looking for. This process begins by sitting down with a business analyst to figure out exactly how an organization operates. There may be hundreds of business rules that just a few employees are supposed to follow in terms of how data is managed. Those rules need to not only be expanded upon and contextualized, but also documented in a way that can then be given to a team of programmers for further development.
At that point, data entry screens can be designed that actually support and empower those rules - making them easier to follow than ever before. On top of that foundation, a flexible database architecture can be built that would allow for any type of reporting - along with easy expansion of the system itself moving forward.
Extra attention can be given to allow screens to automatically reconfigure themselves when they're accessed on mobile devices, allowing employees in the field to be just as productive on-the-go as they can be back at the office.
To find out more information about the differences between spreadsheets, off the shelf software and customized software, or to get answers to any other important questions you may have, please don't delay - contact www.KeeneSystems.com today.
To find out more information about our ASP.NET software development outsourcing capabilities, or if you’d like to discuss how to eliminate data chaos with Keene Systems CEO, Lance Keene click here to book a call with him. You can also download our eBook - Why ASP.NET Development Services Fuels Business Growth - to learn more about this essential topic.