How Many Spreadsheets Does It Take to Run a Fortune 500 Company?

Imo, this is not a quality article worthy of submission to HN.

> Instead of a static data model, we build services around a Modeling Engine that is purpose built to change dynamically.

This is one of those abstract sentences that's typical of marketing hype. If you go to their website to try and research the actual concrete details, you get another high-level overview[1] and clicking on a potential whitepaper is walled off by data-entry screen for contact info (email, phone#, etc.)[2].

[1]http://www.aras.com/technology/model-based-soa.aspx [2]http://www.aras.com/plm-software/100063.aspx

Googling around for actual screen shots of their product, I see the typical GUI type of tools for drag&drop flowcharts and process workflow:

http://plmalpha.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/bpm-workflow-serial...

If those shots are representative of their "dynamic model-based" product, then no, it will not eliminate "spreadsheet hell".

The article is naive about how and why spreadsheets are pervasive and why they will always outpace the speed of IT departments. Ideas such as 4GL, or DSL, or GUI workflow visualizers, or cloud-based tools, etc, etc will not eliminate spreadsheets.

This was originally posted on Wired's 'Innovation Insights': http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/how-many-spreadshee...

"Innovation Insights is a community blog ... Joining in has never been easier ... Sign up, and you are already set up as a contributor who can post blogs and more."

This read like a straight advertisement, yet I didn't hear any real solution other than some sort of "fantastic fix". Frankly, a bit disappointing from Wired. My car seems to come out fine, regardless of the number of spreadsheets involved, thanks.

Excel is actually a pretty sophisticated tool for end-users. It has a scripting language (VBA), it can pull data straight out of databases via ODBC and it can do sophisticated data visualizations (pivot tables and pivot charts). Its weakest point seems to be the inability to trace and document the complex web of formulas in a spreadsheet - you can't diff the old version of a spreadsheet against a new one and see what changes you made in the formulas. If someone could build a tool that could do that, it might make spreadsheets less opaque and more reliable.

Could the solution be faster delivering from IT?

Amazon is capable of delivering changes to it's core apps as fast as "one change per every 11 seconds". An average corporation nowadays delivers a bulk of changes per every 3 months.

I now develop excel add in for a customer.the reason they used to it and hard to changed their mindset.what they thinking is cheaper and fast decision making with excel rather then erp itself.

well they built a system that has a "Modeling Engine that is purpose built to change dynamically". Well exactly this describes Spreadsheets and that is at the same time their asset and problem. Because there is no consistent and well thought-out data model, all kind of inconsistence, integration and redundancy problems occur. Data modeling is no trivial task. Making it change dynamically does not solve this issue, it makes it worse.