One consequence of the unchallenged ubiquity of spreadsheets across banks and other FS organisations is that there are risks around every corner.
Those innocent little spreadsheet-based reports, originally started by one person as a quick solution to a short-term need, quickly evolve and multiply into cumbersome, unscalable, unregistered, and insecure long-term processes. Before you know it, these spreadsheets have established themselves as part of the distributed global team’s daily routine, relied on to feed into wider company budgeting and reforecasting, debt tracking, operational scorecards, or compliance reviews, etc., etc.
Is any of this sounding uncomfortably familiar?
Here at LiveDataset we like to think of these risks as little fires. These fires are unproblematic until they’re under serious pressure but at that point they could explode into serious business compliance problems.
For the most part, this largely unspoken truth is tolerated as a marriage of convenience. Spreadsheets are a fast, easy, cheap, and familiar way to organise problematic datasets. And better alternatives are either really expensive, really slow to implement or really hard to identify. Or worse, a combination of all three.
That’s because all too often, large-scale digital transformation initiatives aren’t interested in these “little fires”. They’re only focused on the largest and brightest flames in the centre of the room.
Spreadsheets aren’t an evil in and of themselves – but they cannot be allowed to undermine department-wide solutions.
When we start to think of rogue spreadsheets as little fires throughout a business, applying a similar fire prevention ethos to identifying, handling, and eliminating them begins to make a lot of sense.
And that’s where we come in.
Our new eBook “Little fires everywhere” provides an easy to digest, practical approach to help you recognise and extinguish the risk of unscalable systems and spreadsheet-based processes.
The eBook covers:
- The underlying reasons why financial fires break out
- How large-scale transformation projects do nothing but fan the flames
- How LiveDataset’s secure, customisable data collaboration platform extinguishes these dangers in days rather than months
By embracing a “fire prevention” mindset, we can help you enable better, data-driven business decisions, take action to rapidly fight your existing little fires, and deliver resilient safeguards for the future of your business.
Download the eBook to find out more.