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Are You Still Using Spreadsheets?
Yesterday, Mark Selcow, president and cofounder of Merced; and Mark Gally, director of marketing at Merced, shared some findings with me about their company’s latest survey: The “Merced Systems 2006 Performance Management Best Practices Study.”
Of the 107 companies interviewed, 94 percent of respondents cited data challenges, 70 percent reported data complexity as a problem, and only 42 percent believe their data is accurate. Gally attributes these statistics to a widespread use of home-grown tools like spreadsheets to track and measure internal performances. The use of such a primitive tool impacts supervisor effectiveness, creates common data challenges, and ultimately affects the customer experience. Gally said, “This not only makes a process less efficient, but it puts into question, ‘Am I really being evaluated fairly?’”
Selcow said he was surprised because the companies were spread across a wide spectrum of industries and sizes, and many were in financial services. Therefore he assumed the majority would be operating on business intelligence systems. Not the case. “If you have operations between 1,000 to even 5,000, it’s hard to use manual tasks like spreadsheets. You can’t run your business on that and a lot of companies are trying to do it.”
Is your company’s data flexible and transparent? Tell us your challenges and solutions.
We have arrived at a juncture in time where we have to acknowledge that performance management is not the silver bullet it was held out to be. We must differentiate between project management (MBO) and talent management. The latter has to do with leveraging the talent of people in terms of the needs of the company. We need a new definition and philosophy for talent. The former has to do with hitting milestones and budgets. Totally different issues.
Maybe the corporate world will wake up soon.
“Is your company’s data flexible and transparent?” I would imagine most people would answer “No” to this question. Why? It may be due, in part, to the rigidity of the systems, platforms, and technology architecture that is touted by companies who sell these systems.
There are over 40 million small businesses worldwide, with over half of them in the United States. Of these in the U.S., over 5 million are employer firms under 500 employees. Where would many of these companies be relative to data (and transparency) if it weren’t for the advent of desktop tools like spreadsheets? Many of their systems are unforgiving when it comes to data entry and limited (in the view from) reporting, i.e., there is no “one size fits all”.
As for the larger firms (with only 107 companies as a data point, I am assuming the survey cited above dealt with the “Global 2000”, only), I recall a presentation I made to a diverse group of IT professionals in Chicago in 2002 (all from large companies). I was the recipient of a round of laughter when I said that “ERP” stood for “Everything Runs Poorly”. Transparency in my mind is about knowing what we don’t know; for some, a distributed application like a spreadsheet can bring that to the forefront. It may be just the empowerment a supervisor needs from the rigidity of an enterprise architecture. Newer software and technology platforms are adopting a “dashboard” that can be adjusted to the users’ requirements for data and display. It’s also the reason that a spreadsheet can (in many cases) extract data seamlessly from the database.
I think it’s equally important to note that Merced is in the business of “contact center and operations performance management systems.” They state they “…turn customer contact centers into higher-performing, data-driven operations.” In that case, it’s easy to see where a spreadsheet could have a negative impact. But, the survey addressed only “three critical areas of performance management”. They are: “General performance management practices, Agent motivation techniques, and Supervisor effectiveness.”
I think to get a more accurate response to your question, as it relates to the survey, you may want to limit your question of flexible data and transparency to only those three areas (in the survey), One’s answer (and the survey’s results) may take on a new appearance and meaning. I know I would see things differently.