Janis O'Bryan views traditional spreadsheet applications in the same light as floppy drives, dial-up modems and other dusty IT relics. "In many respects, it's simply time to move on," says the CIO for Hudson Advisors, a global commercial mortgage brokerage and real estate asset management firm headquartered in Dallas.

By shifting her company's IT and global corporate accounting departments to a business intelligence (BI) application, O'Bryan is like many other CIOs who have transitioned employees away from traditional spreadsheets and toward sophisticated tools produced by vendors such as Oracle, Applix, Business Objects, Cognos, SAS and iDashboards. CIOs who have made the switch frequently cite benefits such as faster and more detailed analysis, better planning capabilities, consistent views between users, automated data inputs from multiple sources and increased data source accuracy.

Of course, no organization wants to get rid of its spreadsheet application just because it's an old technology. Most adopters turn to BI for help with solving strategic business problems, like digging out the hidden meanings buried inside sales statistics or spotting production bottlenecks. But there are other advantages to BI tools, such as how they help users make sense of data.

"BI has a nice way of standardizing how people perform calculations," says David O'Connell, a senior analyst at Nucleus Research. "It allows you to get to work, not to work the data."

The Analysis Problem
For O'Bryan, the decision to jump from Microsoft Excel to Oracle's Hyperion Planning was motivated mostly by a desire to bring consistency to her unit's budgeting and planning operations. "There was no workflow and we were juggling disparate spreadsheet information," she says. That's a big problem when you have a staff that's highly mobile and distributed across several countries.

The software's spreadsheetlike, Web-based interface was another important factor leading to its adoption, O'Bryan says.

"The familiar Excel format meant we didn't have to waste time and resources on end-user training," she notes. "We have centralized budgeting and forecasting, and the fact that it's Web-based means that users in all of the regions can access it remotely in exactly the same way."

O'Bryan feels that Hyperion Planning provides a wider and deeper array of analysis tools than Excel, such as a module that automates the planning of capital assets and capital asset-related expenses. This capability allows the IT group to analyze spending down to much finer levels of detail than would be possible with a spreadsheet. "We can now, for instance, determine whether we need to consolidate hardware purchases by region," she says.