Earlier today I was to-ing and fro-ing with colleagues about a cloud computing conference coming up later in the year. I was given a revised agenda which looked pretty good until I got to ‘Spreadsheets in the Cloud.’ Are you kidding me? Are you utterly freakin’ insane?
I know – accountants are in love with spreadsheets. I’d go further, I’d say spreadsheets are the accountants crack cocaine addiction. Try as I might it is hard to get professionals to see things another way and then I realized a big slice of the problem. When Windows 3 came along and developers started porting their applications from green screens I resisted the move. Why? I could not envisage a day when a mouse driven application would ever be able to compete with data input from a keypad onto a green screen system. And for the first few years I was totally justified in that position. The Windows apps were painting a picture for the future but one that at the time was economically unsustainable for me as an end user buyer. Neither was I prepared to be some vendor’s outsourced development and product testing centre.
The problem is no different today. We’ re awash with data but have comparatively few alternatives to the spreadsheet. Some are emerging (for which see comments to my last rant on this topic) but it is slow going. The guys at Indicee paint a similar style of picture:
The reason behind this little trip down Memory Lane is that everyday here at Indicee, as we innovate for the future, we can’t help but bump up against the past. Not the ancient history I’ve outlined above, we’re confronting the incumbent technology. We’re confronting the stuff that is likely downloaded on your machine today.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see the value an innovation like the electronic calculator brought to the workplace. It’s easy to look back and immediately recognize how important this innovation was for business. Had you been there at that time, you would have jumped on it! Would you not? You would have jumped on it and tossed your old, manual calculator in the first dumpster you could find! Right?
Yet, this sort of reaction is rarely the case when new technologies come to market, isn’t it? When new technologies show up isn’t there normally a great deal of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD)? Isn’t there normally a great deal of resistance to change?
The time is right to acknowledge that the spreadsheet jocks have got a point. BUT – the vendor community needs to iterate its reporting and analytics capabilities really fast. It has to show the value of what it can deliver. I have talked about this many times but here’s a few examples that WILL get professionals champing at the bit:
- Aggregated revenue, CoS and GPN models across industry sectors
- Analysis of spend patterns across major items of spend, again across industry segment
- Aggregated spend patterns for line items like telecommunications, insurance and banking fees. Why? Because that data is gold dust to the providers and if anonymized will be a sale line item for the vendors to which the on-premise guys have no access. It’s a massive opportunity.
But hang on…Intuit has just done something that adequately demonstrates the point. In its Intuit Index.
March employment grew by 0.25 percent, which, when projected over the entire year, equates to a 3 percent annual growth rate. This translates to approximately 50,000 new jobs in March and a slightly revised estimate of roughly 175,000 new jobs since June 2009.
The recently launched monthly index includes aggregate and anonymous employment data from approximately 50,000 small businesses with fewer than 20 employees. These small firms use Intuit Payroll, a small business payroll provider with more than 1 million customers. More information is available at: www.intuitinc.com/payrollindex.
See what’s happening here? Intuit is now a valuable data source. It is able to not only talk to the bare numbers but offer valuable insights into the market. That is HUGE. I’m pretty sure professionals will get THAT message reasonably easily. If so then it is now down to the vendors to saddle up, put their thinking caps on and start creating and marketing solutions that will break the spreadsheet deadlock. If they need any incentive then look at the coverage Intuit’s report is getting (see Zemanta links below.) This is cloud power on steroids.
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- Intuit Small Business Employment Index Shows Continued Growth in Hiring for March (eon.businesswire.com)
- Intuit Payroll Helps Small Businesses Navigate the HIRE Act (eon.businesswire.com)
- Intuit Offers a New Look at the Economy and Employment Trends (mashable.com)
- Intuit’s new index finds small firms hiring (sfgate.com)
