Excel Driven Development: A Symptom of Underlying Problems

What happens to businesses when IT goes dark? Excel driven development happens and it's naaaasty

For business analysts, excel is like the god-hammer that fixes every single data problem they could ever have. "I'll just link up to that one table on this website", they think, "Then I'll pull in data from this database over here and then I'll add four tabs that do a wild amount of calculations in increasing amounts of obfuscation." If they're especially fancy they'll throw in a few VBA functions here and there. Their pet-projects always start off small and seemingly innocent. Yet, like the infamous gremlins of old, deep within lies evil. As the well-meaning business user soon finds out, they're pet-project excel app has become quite unwieldy requiring pages and pages of "documentation" detailing the steps one needs to go through to get the desired output. Sometimes they even bring in excel's red-headed step-brother Access which only gives them more time to let the abomination grow. And what's worse, by that point other people have probably come to rely on this nasty creature of a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet, this abomination, soon engulfs the analyst's time morphing into a black hole of productivity. It's then when they turn to IT and say "Fix this plz."

In Software Engineering, we've come to love and revere Test Driven Development as the George Washington of programming. We should likewise come to fear Excel Driven Development as much as we fear and hate the bird flu or diabetes or Tom Brady and the Patriots or javascript (ok, maybe not javascript). So how does Excel Driven Development happen? Surely no one goes around promoting this kind of behavior on purpose?

Despite my previous disparaging treatment of the average business analyst, I don't think spreadsheet solutions ever get so bad without it being IT's fault. No one promotes the idea of EDD on purpose but many organizations do so on accident through apathy. EDD is a symptom of a dysfunctional IT department because after all, and I might get stoned for saying this, IT exists to serve the business's needs. If a spreadsheet app gets so monstrous and unwieldy, it should've become something else long before.

As for specific reasons why this could happen? The list of possibilities is yuuuuuge. There could be a massive failing project sucking in IT resources from all over the place like an ever-increasing whirlpool of insanity, there could be a crazy-long approval process, there could be data-issue fires to put out left and right, there could be a broken prioritization process. It could be any of these and more or it could simply be that the business doesn't see the value in handing the excel frankenstein off to IT (which, by the way, is also mostly IT's fault). All of these issues contribute to what will almost always be the one underlying problem found across the board: a poor relationship between the business and IT. If the business and IT have a good relationship, the business will be less likely to see excel as this one-size-fits-all tool for their data needs. Instead, they will recognize that IT can develop what they need into a stable solution that benefits the company for a longer period of time. If you're experiencing EDD at your workplace, likely, it's time to find ways to better IT's relationship with the business in addition to any other problems. Finding out what's causing the poor relationship between the business and IT is like trying to diagnose a disease. For now, all I'm saying is that we should recognize EDD as a symptom.