Many media corporations have staff that uses their years of experience to create powerful and unique data analysis in manually created spreadsheets to manage their responsibilities within the business. These spreadsheet calculations may be for analyzing market metrics, generating sales forecasts, or tracking critical business elements that help them make informed decisions. By creating an easy environment for these staff to publish their analysis, other corporate staff can share the value of the calculations and more importantly, this knowledge becomes a formal part of the business assets.
The source data on these shared spreadsheets should not be manually entered but changed to derive from the corporate Business Intelligence data warehouse so that all data is automatically refreshed with the latest validated business totals each time the spreadsheet is used for analysis.
Rather than be stand alone analysis resources, these personal spreadsheets can also be formally integrated into the corporate analysis infrastructure. This is accomplished by moving the calculation formulae in the spreadsheet to become Calculated Measures in the data cube so that the analysis is available from any presentation tool over the data cube. These steps eliminate the need for manual data entry of corporate data and result in analysis that preserves the approved best formulae and is always presented using current and reconciled figures for all corporate users.
Critical business knowledge is consequently preserved and becomes part of your "Institutional Memory" regardless of staff changes and turnover.
The change to the corporate culture to promote the contribution of personal powerful spreadsheets includes three (3) phases:
1. Create personal and departmental portal sites where it is easy to publish spreadsheets.
2. Promote the company's business intelligence cubes as an easy and mandatory source for any business data totals for private spreadsheet analysis.
3. Support adding calculated measures to the cube reflecting the most important formulae in these personal calculations. This allows both new spreadsheets and also any other presentation technology to easily include these useful calculations.
Make the contributions by individuals very visible in the corporation! Public acknowledgement and rewarding such contributions will promote the value of this new culture of saving the institutional knowledge in a central repository for the whole corporation, for both new and existing staff.
BIAnalytix is a media Business Intelligence product from Decentrix that makes it easy and natural to move from personal spreadsheets to the corporate portal. The Excel Services presentation layer of the portal accepts uploaded Excel spreadsheet for publication. It also allows the easy connection of these spreadsheets to the OLAP cubes of the corporate business data. New Calculated Measures can then be easily added to the cubes to replace spreadsheet formulae and fully integrate the power of personal spreadsheets within the corporate portal analysis structure.
