The Excel Metaphor

May 11th, 2007
by Jeremy Thomas

excel.jpgI like the idea of enterprise mashups and am impressed with what IBM is doing with QEDWiki. I was explaining the concept of Rich Internet Applications to some prospective clients the other day and found they struggled with the idea until I drew a metaphor to Excel. Excel is a wildly popular spreadsheet application - everybody loves it. Knowledge workers use it for status reports, pricing, project planning, you name it. Back when I was a software engineer we often got requests to build web pages that “acted like Excel”.

Why is is so popular? Because it gives control to the user. It’s an application that allows the user to dynamically generate tools to help them do their jobs better. Given the un-restraining characteristics of this application and the fact that it’s so prevalent, why have we endeavored for so long to build business applications and knowledge sharing tools behave in the opposite fashion by imposing pre-determined constraints and rules?

Enterprise mashups, and even wikis and blogs, will succeed because they follow the same fundamental principles that Excel does. They presuppose very little about how knowledge workers do their jobs and are malleable enough to adapt to unforseen conditions.

After explaining it in this way to my audience I got a lot of nodding heads.

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Tagged With enterprise 2.0, adoption, mashups

2 Responses to “The Excel Metaphor”

  1. Michael Says:
    May 12th, 2007 at 11:40 am

    I reckon it will even cooler if you not only have fixed mashups, but you can widgetized (widgets in MAC/Vista) your enterprise/corporate services on the user’s screen.

    A good widget tool will be to display stock quotes for shareholders of the company. There you have a WEB APPLICATION that behaves similarly to DESKTOP APPS.

    Imagine a web portal that delivers, at first go, all the information about the corporate services that you are interested in. (airline tracking..etc…)

  2. Simon Carswell Says:
    May 15th, 2007 at 3:44 am

    It’s a useful analogy. At the investment bank where I used to work, I used to joke that their mindset was “the answer’s a spreadsheet; what was the question?” and yet I don’t believe they would have been naturally receptive to Enterprise 2.0. Maybe the approach you mention is the right way to sell the idea.

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