Data Dogma and Elitism

I detest dogmatism and elitism.  Few subjects expose those attitudes in data teams than the role of Excel in a data ecosystem.

I've had numerous debates about this in the past few years, protesting techno-feudalism driving an expensive, time-consuming, tools-first agenda, while ignoring the fundamental needs of the customer.

Meanwhile, knowledge workers armed with nothing more than an M365 subscription have to figure out how to keep the business running.

Enter the most demonized software ever deployed - Excel.

In companies of all sizes and industries, I hear the same mantra from data teams:  "We need to get the business off Excel."  I parroted this dogma myself for years.

Firm belief that "users" can't be trusted to engage with data they understand far better than most data engineers erects barriers to providing actionable intelligence up their chain of command. 

Elitism fed from this dogma views these users and their tools as clumsy posers who fall far short of the technical sophistication needed for developing reliable analytics.  Yet for years I've engaged with these users, their tactics and tools, often having to acknowledge that they were right and I - as the data leader - was wrong.

Here's what finally broke me.  A data distribution triggering termination of access for employees was defective and incorrectly disconnecting workers. 

Tickets were raised. 

The data team took no action, dismissively stating that the product "performed to requirements as communicated". 

The recipient IT group engaged a business analyst to write a report and export it daily to Excel for manual upload into the access management system and stopped the bleeding. 

That analyst came to me begging for relief. 

I identified multiple defects (using SQL and Excel), confirmed the fix eliminated the issue with all parties, and delivered my analysis and specification to the originating team.

Eleven months after original delivery, the issue was still not fixed. The dogmatic, elitist mindset ignored the feedback of three different parties to slow walk their own investigation, perpetuating distrust.

There is no world where I can accept this as status quo.

Why do data teams continue catastrophizing the use of Excel as a data tool?  They insist it's responsible for bad outcomes, but my experience indicates that business leaders trust the results coming from Excel use far more than those coming from data teams.

This is why I oppose the Stockholm Syndrome dynamic where IT holds the business' data hostage, and they live in a conflicted state between outrage with and obligation to their captors.