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, Nicotine — Why Can’t Procurement Shake the Excel Addiction? (Part 1)
We all have our vices here in the Spend Matters office. Sheena will barely say hello before she’s ingested at least two cups of coffee. I personally drink (daily) more green tea than probably a small town in Japan does. And the wh…
Spend Matters Study: Forget Ariba, SAP and Oracle — World Class Procurement Organizations Use Excel
In conjunction with the Centre for Supply Management Business Research based in Leeds, UK and Société de Gestion des Opérations in Nice, France, Spend Matters is pleased to publish preliminary findings from an ongoing study exa…
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 [...]
Tibco Silver Spotfire – Social BI? Why Not?
Tibco, fresh from a Q2 with license revenue up 23% over last year’s, continuing a two year run of beating consensus earnings estimates, has stepped up and out ahead to pursue the long-coveted mid-market customers who don’t use BI but find that spreadsheets don’t do enough. Tibco believes, like Microsoft, that many are social technology [...]
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 Spreadsheet gets a (Revision) History
Today marks the 30th anniversary of VisiCalc, the spreadsheet that sparked the PC Revolution. You can read on Dan Bricklin’s blog the evolution of the spreadsheet from then to now, the day Socialtext took SocialCalc out of beta. To help…
