Manual workarounds: From EUCs to Excel

For most Operations teams, using Excel or other end-user computing solutions (EUCs) to manage data is a necessary evil. They offers the agility needed to keep the lights on when the alternative is to spend months going through the legacy change process.

Excel is a powerful tool in its own right, but it wasn’t built for this kind of complexity, or an environment that demands this level of oversight. Neither are the solutions that users create themselves. This, in fact, is an area that early stage AI maturity can exacerbate. Instead of building a spreadsheet, Ops users can now have generative AI code entirely bespoke applications.

Spreadsheets, databases, shared drives outside of IT knowledge, and now AI-coded apps, all introduce operational risk. Human error is unavoidable, and the chances of something going wrong only increase as the volume of data being copy-pasted into spreadsheets and EUCs increases. A single error can have a huge impact.

The web of manual workarounds shrouds your Operations in opacity. It’s impossible to get a high-level view of where your data is and what’s happening to it when so many of your processes are hidden away in spreadsheets and bespoke apps, or running in something like ChatGPT. This robs you of business intelligence, while inhibiting compliance. How can you explain the lifecycle of your data to auditors when you have no view of where it’s been or how it’s changed?

These ‘shadow IT’ solutions also create key-person dependencies: only the person who originally set it up can figure out what the control is doing and why. Once they’ve moved role or company, you’re left with a process that ‘works’, but you have no idea how, or what happens when you need to change it.

Ultimately, these kinds of workarounds are short-term fixes that create long-term challenges. They introduce complexity to your organisation. Most firms will readily agree that they need to get rid of their EUCs, but until the recent advances in agentic technology, it simply hasn’t been possible – and many still don’t know that’s changed.

Modern technology removes the need for these workarounds and replaces them with a powerful set of tools that end-users can leverage to perform the same tasks more efficiently, with the correct governance and control. The end-user is still very much involved in the process, but now they are using agentic AI and no-code technology to build processes on a platform designed for efficiency, compliance and transparency.