Power back in the hands of the business user

Last Updated on Thursday, 1 November 2007 08:29 Written by Steve Thursday, 1 November 2007 08:29

ONE/Northwest is a small business. Sure we’re a nonprofit, but we’re also a consulting shop with salaries, customers, and revenue streams. A big challenge for my boss Gideon Rosenblatt is to keep us running so we can continue to help the Pacific Northwest move toward living in harmony with our environment.

To be able to run our business well, we need to forecast and budget. It’s been hard to do over the years, as we depend on three revenue streams that are each hard to project in their own ways: consulting project demand, grant funding, and individual donations.

Gideon has been cranking lately on working out the business questions to ask so that he can forecast each of those streams of revenue better. in short, he starts with projections based on past experience, and then as we get closer to today, those projections increasingly start to take into account actual data–projects in the queue, grants we’re waiting to hear on, donations that have been promised.

That real data that we have about our business is all in our Salesforce.com instance. If we want to use that in Excel why recreate that data in the spreadsheet? Why not just feed the real data into his calculations, making his projections account for our reality? And why not have his projections automatically change when our reality changes?

Well, that’s what we’ve done. We’re using the Excel integration that comes with Salesforce.com to pull 25 different data sets into Gideon’s forecasting spreadsheet. This raw data then feeds his complex calculations, giving him robust forecasts that change as the real data changes.

So here’s the kicker: I didn’t do any programming to make this happen. Gideon did all the work, none of which was programming. All he had to do was create the Salesforce.com reports he wanted and then pull them into Excel using the nice wizard in the Excel integration. I spent all of 10 minutes showing him how the tools worked, and next thing I knew he had 25 data sources dynamically embedded in his forecasting spreadsheet.

Now, Gideon isn’t your average boss. He’s the best boss I’ve had and really smart about our business and our mission (I’m not fishing for a raise…) He’s been in and around technology for a long time, and is very comfortable with it. But he’s not superman either. He’s not a coder, and he’s not a database expert. He’s a Business User, and business users are good at thinking about business questions, and they’re good at using Excel to model solutions.

The hard part to solving this problem of forecasting is what the hard part should always be: asking and answering the business questions. Technology shouldn’t be the hard part, even if we’ve become accustomed to that being the case. Gideon shouldn’t have to come to me, explain the business question he’s trying to solve, and have me write some custom code to make it happen. Coming back to me when he realizes that he needs different/more data.

And with Salesforce.com and the Excel integration he doesn’t have to. Excel is within his grasp. Writing Salesforce.com reports is within his grasp. Everything he needs to get this work done is now there for him. This system returns the power to solve business questions to where it belongs, the business user. And that makes me very happy…