Connected Workspace – Ideal replacement for Excel in Finance

This category of platform feature is a mouthful, but it is all about managing the process from end to end.  Spreadsheets were not designed for collaboration, workflow, and to be part of a mission-critical process, yet today that is how they are used.  Spreadsheets don’t streamline processes; they confuse them.  In addition, analysis has evolved from being a “single desk” activity to a “team sport” – a collaborative exercise between Finance and other business functions to drive performance. 

Systems, however, have not evolved to address this need. Having an Excel file on the cloud or shared drive for intra & inter team collaboration doesn’t cut it. Spreadsheets of the future need robust workflow, collaboration, version control, and change management at every step of the analysis process to enable cross-collaboration across different business functions and shared insights. 

Along with the structure of workflow and collaboration comes security management.  Security control at the database level to understand who can access the spreadsheets files and who can see specific values at the cell level.  

Imagine a spreadsheet containing payroll information; those with access rights to those fields can see the information, and those that don’t have rights see asterisks in place of values.  The values are still there, and the totals still work, but anything related to those values, that would allow you to derive compensation would be obfuscated with “*********”.

Along with a workflow system comes version control and change management to track changes and provide an audit trail so minor changes can be managed with audit rollback and version control used appropriately for different versions.  No more 50 versions hanging out on a hard drive because of minor changes.

By resolving these five challenges Finance is ready to embrace the new world of the “Citizen Analyst”.

Today, most analytical processes are concentrated within a few departments in an organization, with very limited access to others. There are System Admins who know how to configure and Process Specialists who know what to configure. This legacy mechanism becomes taxing on the departments running the analytical show, as processes based on spreadsheets are linear and are directly correlated to the number of people involved in the exercise.

With the ever-increasing demand for business insights from stakeholders, we need a mechanism where the dependency on specific teams & specialists is minimized. Real-time access to information, as was mentioned above, directly by ‘Citizen Analysts’ is key. A Citizen Analyst is a non-IT, non-admin user who doesn’t necessarily have a strong technology background. This user is generally concerned with the execution of tasks by collaborating with multiple functional users and departments. The Citizen Analyst has both the ability to set up the data and analyze it and generally prefers to use Excel/Spreadsheets.

Operations Analysts should be able to directly connect to P&L information (albeit with appropriate access rights) without any intervention of System Admin’s monthly batch release or Process Specialists data messaging for consolidated Financial data. A robust system, which can enable this entire chain, is the need of the hour. This is the only way to scale analysis to all business teams.

Connected Workspace is the need of the hour for spreadsheets to upgrade and become the next-generation tool. Connected Workspaces address the key items identified in the first section: structuring data and real-time access, collaboration, workflow, process control, security, audit control, and version management. 

Connected Workspaces empowers the ‘Citizen Analysts’ to be self-reliant and allows them to execute tasks with collaboration across multiple departments and processes.  They can also automate the analytic processes across their organization. With Connected Workspace(s?), the users can integrate and derive analytics with autonomy for fast, accurate decisions.

Some of the advantages of Connected Workspaces 

Empowerment: Allows the Citizen Analyst to be in control and self-supporting to manage all aspects of their analysis, from sourcing the data to performing the calculations and the analysis. 

Automation: Offers a platform to perform, standardize, and catalog the analysis. The activity is not just restricted to analyzing information  but also creating local applications to automate  analysis 

Collaboration: Users can update, retrieve, and share information from a centralized system, which offers a unified view of data or insights. Stakeholders can easily collaborate and seek clarifications on the platform, accumulating organizational insights rather than scattering them into long email chains for analysis.

Connected Workspaces not only enable robust and streamlined processes but also enable improved decision-making. There are multiple ways they can help the finance teams in this new age of transformation. 

Our next blog will focus on a specific use case of Connected Workspaces across functions, processes, and applications to help visualize how it impacts Finance’s digital transformation.