Andrew White

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Andrew White
Research VP
8 years at Gartner
22 years IT industry

Andrew White is a research vice president and agenda manager for MDM and Analytics at Gartner. His main research focus is master data management (MDM) and the drill-down topic of creating the "single view of the product" using MDM of product data. He was co-chair… Read Full Bio

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Symposium News: It’s a Spreadsheet World

by Andrew White  |  October 22, 2009  |  1 Comment

Several of my user 1-1’s today highlighted another piece of research that continues to put the spotlight on a part of IT that remains complex.  Organizations from different industries reported how they continue to wrestle with spreadsheets.  It seems that despite the growing focus on MDM, EIM and EIA, a huge amount of data resides outside the formal purview of IT.  

Much data, some master data and much more related to it, exists in systems that surround the formal IT systems.  Just walk through the offices of your business and look at the desktop’s of the users.  You will see sticky notes attached to the screen; Spreadsheets peaking out from behind the Order Entry screen; scribbled notes on last months report sitting on the desk next to the screen, and so on.  And we should not forget all the other data that sits in other applications on the desktop – what Microsoft calls Enterprise Applications (which are not the Enterprise Applications I talk about).

Despite all the progress and promise we see with MDM, it seems at least one other frontier remains “out there”.  We call this place, “Process of Me”.  The Process of Me describes the business processes from the user perspective, not the application or the IT perspective.  The Process of Me view models all the data and tasks users follow and need to get their work done.  

Over time IT seeks to extends its formal system of control and governance to include this Process of Me – but it seems that there is far more work in this areas ahead of us, than is behind.  I think I will stick to MDM for a few years…might be a bit easier….

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1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Ralph Baxter   December 7, 2009 at 10:39 am

    To us at ClusterSeven this is a very interesting issue. As many will know we focus in the sector of Enterprise Spreadsheet Management (r). However, this sector has perhaps become overly attached to the world of compliance rather than data integrity. This is probably because a focus on the data requires a much more business-oriented approach. For example just having a audit trail of what has happened does not, on its own, tell you whether data is good or bad.