Our hero, Kevin Whatnot, is a business analyst at Kossar’s, a tier-one bialy manufacturer. He’s responsible for maintaining the sales forecast and the factory production and utilization information, among other tasks.

He gets this information from a mix of sources: Kossar’s Siebel SFA (sales force automation) system, a homebrewed SQLServer-based inventory system, a partially-implemented Manugistics package for supply chain. And email. And lots and lots of phone calls.

Every Thursday, he hosts two long conference calls; in the morning, for sales managers to give their updated sales forecasts for each of their regions, and in the afternoon for factory managers to give their updated production forecasts. He crunches all of this information in a complicated Excel spreadsheet that he mails out first thing on Friday morning and then again, with updates from the various systems, again on Wednesdays in preparation for the big Thursday calls.

Now, Kevin is a skilled Excel user; he’s capable of doing sophisticated analysis in Excel, but he tends to use it for *everything* including tasks that it’s not ideally suited for, such as presentation. The sets of spreadsheets that Kevin emails around each week are each multi-tabbed affairs, sent as zipped attachments to save on space, but which do not themselves do a lot of calculation. Excel largely serves as a presentation layer for Kevin’s massively complex data.

He’s more of a user than a superuser for the other enterprise apps he deals with: Manugistics, for example, is mostly a mystery to him but he needs a couple of numbers from it each week and he knows how to navigate the system to find them. Likewise with the homebrewed database application; Kevin suspects that no one understands it completely anymore. He gets around inside of it like he drives around Boston; lacking signposts or a navigational system he can comprehend, he relies on landmarks and prior experience. And he hopes that he doesn’t make a wrong turn.
His victims, the sales and factory managers, are likewise cruelly (cruelly!) limited by their available tools. They understand Excel, perhaps not as well as Kevin but they probably have a better sense of the business implications of his number-crunching.