Involve them in the same conspiracy

As previously noted, I am listening to the lectures from Berkeley's CS 61A. In the fifth lecture, the class is listening to a video of Alan Kay. He ends the talk, "If you want others to go along with you, you have to involve them in the same conspiracy." Oddly, this made me think about spreadmarts. Wayne Eckerson at TDWI create this term. He described a spreadmart as:

renegade spreadsheets and desktop databases that are wreaking havoc on organizations. Since then, many people have adopted the term because it highlights a painful, yet largely ignored, problem that plagues organizations today.

Spreadmarts contain vital pieces of corporate data that are needed to run the business. But since spreadmarts are created by individuals at different times using different data sources and rules for defining metrics, they create a fractured view of the enterprise. Without a single version of corporate data and centrally defined metrics, employees can’t share a common understanding the business. With spreadmarts, each worker marches to the “beat of their own drummer” instead of marching together toward a common goal. In short, spreadmarts undermine corporate productivity and sabotage business alignment.

I think Mr. Eckerson needs to consider Alan Kay's words. Mr. Eckerson has just cast the creators of spreadmarts as corporate saboteurs that are destroying the One True Way™ that he and and upper management wish to bestow upon their ungrateful underlings. This is a very top down approach, that probably isn't going to work well. He does present a 'co-opt' solution where you agree to using CVS output so the spreadsheet jockeys can still use their beloved Excel. Bu with title like Reeling in Spreadmarts, In Search of a Single Version of Truth: Strategies for Consolidating Analytic Silos and Taming Spreadsheet Jockeys, I hear contempt for the existing business processes and the folks on the front line that do the business' work.

Consider how differently Kirk Wylie treats the traders in financial firms in RESTful Approaches to Financial Services. They are exactly the 'spreadsheet jockeys' derided by Eckerson. Wylie describes centralized systems as über-systems, clearly a derogatory term. Mr. Wylie also recognizes the proper desire for traders to keep control of their data processing. He notes that developers are only acquiring the needed business understanding to become productive after three to four months - he is looking for bottom up solutions that support the 'front line', not centralized solutions to give upper management a dashboard of global KPIs, key performance indicators. He accepts that "Any system that doesn't consider the traders pathological dependency on Excel is doomed to failure." In the rest of the talk, he describes how RESTful solutions allow him to roll out shared data across a variety of format, including Excel, to end users on demand.

Like Alan Kay, Kirk Wylie is involved in the same conspiracy as his users. I'm betting he has more success than Mr. Eckerson is rolling out working systems.