Spreadsheets Confidential – The Connected Business – Part 2

The other day I wrote about the special section of the Financial Times called ‘The connected business’. One of the key take aways from this section was the fact that way too many finance departments are putting their faith into spreadsheets.

A few years ago, my team started conducting some surveys amongst finance professionals. For this purpose we teamed up with David Axson (co-founder of the Hackett Group, book author). We specifically went after professionals that were not using Performance Management software, yet. One of the key things we were interested in was the type of work finance professionals do. It quickly crystalized that there were five major categories of work. The results looked like this:

The majority of the time is apparently spent on manual tasks such as collecting data (loading data from systems into spreadsheets, copying & pasting, manually entering budgeting numbers, etc..), maintaining spreadsheets (development, fixing formulas, aggregating spreadsheet data, Visual Basic programming etc.) and then also developing reports & presentations (creating spreadsheet reports, graphs, Powerpoints etc.). Only about 20% of the overall time is apparently spent on the high-value tasks such as performing in-depth analysis, running what-if scenarios, personal development etc.. A shocking but not a surprising picture. When we present the results to finance professionals we get a lot of head-nods. But I often sense a certain level of resignation as well (“Oh yeah….I know….that’s just the way it is.”).

Statistics are always a bit dry. So we took the data and applied the percentage distribution to a work week. The picture now looks quite interesting. What do you think?

How does this feel? Same numbers. Just a different perspective. Two key questions come to mind: Can we live with that situation? Would we want to live with this situation? I doubt it. I have been there and didn’t necessarily like this. Sure, it’s nice to play around with spreadsheets knowing that you are indispensable. But is that what we want to get out of our professional lives? Is that why we went to business school? Is that why we spent so many hours studying for the CPA, CMA, CFA exams?

Technology helps shift this picture around tremendously. We can literally reverse this. I will write about that in the next few weeks. For now, I will leave you with this picture. Take a look at your own work environment. How do you get things done? How do your clients operate? Is there room for improvement? Would love to hear your thoughts and about your own experiences.