No More Excel

Excel managing or trying to manage and control an IT department with Excel will be a disaster for any organization. It will wind up never having the information up to date, spending (wasting) money and valuable man hours in searching for the information, putting it into the excel file and, in the end, wasting more man hours from other assets to pass the information from excel files to a database app, it does not matter if there is a “batch process” because we all know that excel is not bug free. Best case scenario it would have information from several weeks or months ago loaded in a repository to support a business reality that would have, definitely, changed, hence, so would have its needs and requirements.

We are all capable professionals, filling an excel sheet(s) is, from my point of view, an approach to use with end users. We still have to support the business while we are on an epic search of the level of detail  of the information required on any of the many excel files we are asked to fill.

The reality of the business and its support needs are best perceived in the field, Local administrators are the ones that receive complains from the end user so, it is my opinion that best solutions will come out from that level. It will be a bit slower to implement solution? YES, but it will be a sustainable one, it will be a solution that will enable upper levels with updated information (up to the hour) of the IT infrastructure.

I mean this to be a very condensed resume of what I have observed to be a common misstake when trying to gain more control in the IT spendings or projects. We can do sooo much better than Excel files!