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Lessons from forty years of Excel: if you give people tools, expect them to be used
One of the anniversaries I missed last year was that of Microsoft Excel, which turned forty in August.
I think that anybody who has worked in enterprise technology over any part of those four decades will have mixed feelings about Excel. On one hand, they will be grateful for a flexible tool which almost everybody has access to, most people know how to use, and which can be used for modelling and forecasting without the need to run big projects or write complex programmes. On the other hand, they will remember the times when a major upgrade was delayed because of a set of fragile, convoluted macros, when a business critical operation depended on a spreadsheet which only one person understood, or when they were asked to ‘just’ take the logic embedded in a spreadsheet and make it into a system that worked for the whole company.
Will conversation save us from frustration?
. . . I will do such things -
What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the Earth!
These are King Lear’s lines in Act 2, Scene 4, as he rages against his daughters.
Like much of Shakespeare, these lines can be interpreted in distinctly different ways. I have seen them played as threats of fathomless malice: I shall do such terrible things that they cannot even be named. And I have seen them played as expressions of impotence and frustration: I am so powerless that I cannot even say what I will do.
We might think that, in our normal lives, we could not attain the towering anger of a mythic and tragic figure such as Lear. Yet it is remarkable how frequently, when faced with even little frustrations, we find ourselves uttering curses that might rival Shakespeare for venom and invention.
Is your technology solution a well behaved house guest?
‘How many devices do you have in your home connected to the Internet? One? Three? Five?’
It was 2010. I was attending an internal conference within the technology department of a large bank. The leader of the digital team was illustrating the rapid expansion of the Internet, and the importance of digital customer experience.
Most people put their hands up to show that they owned a few connected devices. Most put their hands down by the time the count rose to five.
I considered my answer to the question. I had a work laptop in my bag. I had an iPhone and a work Blackberry. I had two PCs at home with a broadband connection. My wife had an iPhone too. We had six connected devices in our house (sometimes). I was at the top end of the spectrum; perhaps I even counted as an early adopter!