by Markus Nolle*
Let’s face it, we all have a love/hate relationship with spreadsheets. We love how quickly we get started, but more often than not, we hate where we end up – complex cascading Workbooks that take forever to maintain; irreconcilable versions of spreadsheets that are out of date the moment they are emailed, all floating about the organisation; and pie charts and graphs that are not really sophisticated and don’t quite tell the story that we’re after.
This is, however, a frustrating necessity that has grown to fill the analytics and reporting shortcomings of councils’ often ageing core operational information systems.
There is inevitably a ‘major systems upgrade roadmap’ that the IT folk are diligently following that one day might deliver some improved capability in this space, but what do you do in the meantime?
Fortunately, innovative and affordable alternatives in a new generation of web based analytics and data visualisation tools are now available.
Most notable in our opinion is Tableau® (see www.tableausoftware.com). It was built in 2003 from the ground up in research labs at Stanford University by a team of computer science data visualisation specialists. Their mission was to transform the way people interact with and understand data.
Having embraced these new technologies ourselves over three years ago, we have since assisted State Government agencies with their financial budget management and forecasting, financial institutions spend analysis and reporting for strategic procurement, and even retail chains with their performance management in rapidly deploying Tableau® analytics and reporting solutions.
Without fail, we have been able to exceed stakeholders’ expectations in days and weeks, not months and years, with construction of dashboards and visualisation of data in ways they have never seen before.
So next time you’ve got those spreadsheet blues, why not take some time out to have a look at these new technologies and consider what they might be able to offer you.
*Markus Nolle is the Managing Director of Inventri. He can be contacted on 0414 602 298 or by email at markus.nolle@inventri.com.
