Every company has one.
A spreadsheet that is not in the ERP, not officially owned by anyone, and somehow absolutely essential to the business.
It usually lives on one person's laptop.
That person has usually been there forever.
And the file is called something reassuring like:
Master List v14 FINAL.xlsx
Possibly followed by:
FINAL FINAL.xlsx
Here's the test:
If that person did not come in tomorrow, what stops?
Most executives can answer that question pretty quickly.
Which means the problem isn't that nobody knows about the spreadsheet.
Everybody knows.
The spreadsheet survives because it works.
And things that work have a remarkable ability to avoid meetings.
The real risk isn't losing the file.
It's losing what the file's owner knows that never made it into the file.
Why one customer gets special pricing.
Why that vendor should never be used.
Why one item is coded differently from all the others.
Why the process works this way even though nobody remembers deciding it.
That's not data.
That's institutional memory with column headings.
You don't need a project to fix this.
Just find the spreadsheet.
And make sure more than one person knows what it knows.
You'll probably find it faster than you think.
Jim Rosenberg
President & CEO, NEO3
The Workaround — because every system has them.
