Over the years, I have been on both sides of IT. As a manager of business units, I have been an impatient “customer.” As a software developer and manager of teams of software developers, I have experienced the frustrations of IT with the business side’s ever-changing requirements.

In this post, I explore one of the thorniest issues between business and IT that I frequently encounter: the use of Microsoft Excel.

The business view: Excel is a necessary tool we have gotten used to

Many business analysts and business-unit managers love the flexibility and freedom that Excel offers. Some of them have years of experience using Excel, especially for budgeting, forecasting, and making use of report data. They prefer to receive reports as Excel spreadsheets, because they can easily sort, filter, pivot, and chart the data as they please.

Many end-users also tend to prefer Excel to centrally controlled “business intelligence tools.” Jorge Camoes posted this piece of advice in a blog post on using Excel rather than IT-selected BI dashboard tools:

IT will try to change your project, naturally. Try to avoid the “security bomb” (their favorite). You know how poor their expensive BI toys are, and you should know what they can and can’t do with them. Minor concessions can earn you some points. When they tell you they can’t implement your core ideas be prepared to fake genuine surprise, compare costs (again) and emphatically say that their options clearly don’t meet the organization’s needs.

The IT view: Excel is a dangerous tool in the hands of business users

Many IT departments view Excel as a potential source of data corruption. It is very easy for the end-users to introduce errors into Excel spreadsheets. It is also easy for multiple versions of Excel files to exist, each with a slightly different “version of the truth.” Each end-user could have changed some of the data in his version of the spreadsheet. As a result, it is very common for different end-users to have conflicting data values in their spreadsheets.

In general, the problem is that no one can verify if the data shown in an Excel spreadsheet is accurate. In contrast, IT’s databases and data warehouses have data that has been validated (at least, it should be consistent with data in the “books and records” of the mission-critical software applications). IT would prefer that business decisions should be based on the data in their databases and business intelligence tools.

Bridging Views: Use Excel when it is the best available tool for the specific project

Business and IT should both keep in mind that there is no one tool that is appropriate for all situations. Sometimes, Excel will be the best option. Sometimes the best option will be a software tool running on IT-controlled servers.

The main considerations may well be the availability of IT resources and budget. Most IT solutions will be much more expensive than Excel-based solutions created by a business analyst. However, if the software licenses already exist, and if the data is already in a database or data warehouse, and if IT has available development resources – then the IT solution may offer a more accurate and reliable platform for business use.

On the other hand, if IT will ask for 9 months and $100,000 to implement a report or a dashboard that a business analyst can create with Excel in a couple of days (followed by a month or two of refinement), then IT should endorse Excel for the project. There will surely be many other projects that IT can more productively focus on.