The team and I at Ventana Research through development of new research agendas for 2009 have identified business and technology thematic topics that will be critical to all organizations. These topics will be critical for business and IT to be more educated and savvy on how to leverage them for their organizations. These are our assertions and not just predictions for success in this year and we remain optimistic that business can drive significant change in how they use information and technology to advance their processes and people who operate them along with management who need better tools for being effective in their decisions.

Spreadsheets: you can’t live with ‘em and you can’t live without ‘em. Almost nothing has improved productivity over the past three decades as the desktop spreadsheet (especially in finance). For this reason, and because there are large numbers of people trained to use them, spreadsheets have become the tool of choice for all sorts of analysis, reporting, prototyping and data storage. However, our benchmark research shows spreadsheets are now being seriously misused in ways that severely hamper the productivity and performance of corporations. It’s time you seriously rethink how your organization uses spreadsheets.

Our research confirms desktop spreadsheets pose serious productivity issues. Half find dealing with spreadsheet problems consumes a noticeable amount of time. Errors are a problem: just under half find major errors in data and formulas in their most important spreadsheets. These errors pose financial and reputational risk because most people only check selected cells. Dealing with errors is time consuming and just over half find the spreadsheets they receive are not as timely as they should be. More than half find resolving spreadsheet errors delays business processes and 42% find out-of-date information in their spreadsheets frequently or all the time. Just over half find rolling up spreadsheets is usually or always time consuming. Yet, users are in denial, since only a handful think spreadsheets pose a productivity issue.

Spreadsheets are essential for individual or ad hoc analysis and reporting. For any task where more than six people are using a spreadsheet more than six times you need an alternative. For collaborative enterprise tasks such a planning, companies should be using a dedicated application. Applications with a spreadsheet interface but connected to a multidimensional database should be used for sharing data in groups. If your organization stubbornly clings to desktop spreadsheets despite their potential for financial or reputational loss, you should be using some form of management and control application to reduce the risk of this occurring.

2009 should be the year your company enters a 12-step program spreadsheet addiction problem. Step one, as always, is admitting you have a problem.

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