Comment by manishsharan
6 years ago
>> the amount of money and effort people waste on 'enterprise solutions' that are both orders of magnitude more expensive and inferior".
Let me give you another perspective: One of the reasons the Enron scandal happened was because traders for a major canadian bank,my former employer, kept the trades on their deskop Excel and audit and risk had no way of knowing the actual risk to the bank. When I was hired to build an expensive enterprise app that allowed only limited set of financial models, every single user hated it at first: it was both orders of magnitude more expensive and inferior". But the bank now has full uptothe minute knowledge of its risk exposure and the system has proven itself.
That's not really what I'm talking about. That's back to front, where you're using Excel as the core repository for important stuff. I'm talking about using VBA/Office the other way around, to combine and report on stuff that lives in various databases and systems, and thereby prevents what you're talking about.
The kind of alternatives I was questioning are BI reporting solutions - I have especially painful memories of Qlikview, and I just googled the licensing fees and they are insane.
Finanacial models need to exist in a central repository where they could be audited or updated. The issue with Excel is that the model is created/managed on desktops and the enterprise has no way of knowing if the model is accurate. We use Tableau and we like being able to centrally manage the model.