Is Excel a Problem?

These thoughts were triggered in my mind by a recent Wall Street Journal article, titled: "

Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs".  (Please see: https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-using-excel-finance-chiefs-tell-staffs-1511346601 and read the very many insightful comments.)

Yes, I too am tired of MS Excel paradigm.  It is like always a wearing gingham shirt - so many men in IT express their inner-nerd that way.  I mean, if they want Excel-like features, we could always use VBA to tie a UI, in Excel, to the back-end services (be they direct database connections or REST API calls.)

We serve the end users poorly by giving them Excel look alike UI, but in HTML.  We are missing something essential in requirements engineering by not providing a different paradigm (say a Wizard, or an Informative AI Agent),  thus hiding all that cognitive complexity from them.

I think Excel is widely used precisely because IT cannot create light-weight tactical solutions, or, as often is the case, plain refuses to do so.

Myself and others have created such tools for small groups, say less than 10 users, using VBA, REST API, or ODBC-based database access solutions.  But that has never been where the action was. 

Monolithic Web applications rule the roost.  Likely because CIOs understand that level of budgeting and find such systems to be a feather in their hats.

There are very good reasons for small teams (~ 10) to use Excel; IT is not going to make a better tool for small groups of people, Excel is ubiquitous with tremendous analytical capabilities built-in, that team controls the evolution of their Excel tool themselves; changes do not have to be begged from IT, and lastly because of the heterogeneity of corporate data stores which forces people to use data from semantically distinct systems with little or no overlaps in their respective ontologies.

This last one could be ameliorated via some sort of AI-enabled Data Buddy, which could infer missing data from what is in Excel and go and fetch it from whichever database that contains that missing data - all without the end-users being aware of them; sort of like an active Data Management agent on steroids.

In the many engineering firms, there are engineering teams that use home-grown Excel tools for their data management needs.  Generic tools, Cloud-based or not, are not useful to them: they are not accountants.  And yet, how quickly we at IT can enhance their existing tools, let alone replace them?  How long does it take to gather requirements, build another silly Angular/Spring-Boot system, and fit it with Excel import-export facilities?

In Web applications that follow the Excel tabular data presentation paradigm, there are great opportunities to move away from tabular data presentation to Insights gleaned from data and automatically generated and presented to the end-users.  That is what IT should do rather than implementing yet another useless and expensive CR.

I own many gingham shirts, but I also wear many different fabrics and patterns.  We, at IT,  need to give end-users more options and unless they positively and adamantly ask for little grids, we should engage in a dialogue to explore the design space: and not just for today or tomorrow, but for the Day after Tomorrow as well.