Managing Small Businesses with Spreadsheets
In any company, in any industry, the flow of information is paramount. Whether yours is a small, mid, or large company, facilitating the flow of information can have vast improvements not only in communication, but also in productivity, production cost, and overall service quality. This is what is commonly known as Information Management or IM for short.
IM is informational synergy, which occurs when individuals are able to share information across roles and boundaries, and especially when one source of information can be used to glean insight into another (for example, Performance Dashboards in ERP/CRM systems). The value of information is always higher when it is pooled in a central location.
So what about spreadsheets? They’re extremely versatile, dynamic, and unless you keep gigantic, multi-gigabyte spreadsheets with thousands of formulas, they’re extremely easy to use. But they’re strength is also they’re weakness. While they make it easy to calculate numeric figures or even make textual presentations, they unavoidably decentralize information into multiple documents (informational silos) that end up distributed all over the place.
And this is terrible news for Information Management! Not only does it make it difficult to find any particular piece of information, it pretty much puts a halt to sharing of information across multiple individuals, roles, not mention departments… and that means that the individuals in the organization are having a hard time getting a hold on the information they need. All this boils down to operational inefficiency.
So what can a small business do, especially when enterprise-grade solutions (like ERP systems) are so expensive? The good news is that the internet has created opportunity for everyone—especially for small businesses. The reduced production/maintenance costs of Web-based applications, and the cheap, mass-distribution of Software-as-a-service and Cloud Computing have made it possible for developers to create enterprise-grade solutions at low prices that even small businesses can afford.
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