We're looking forward to O'Reilly's Money:Tech Conference, which was announced a couple weeks ago and will be held right here in Manhattan this February. I'm sure plenty of St. Croix-based hedge fund managers will balk at the notion of trekking up to New York in the middle of February, but this couldn't be more convenient for us.
We talk a lot about how spreadsheet processes are error-prone, but in general, we're fairly abstract about it. Specific examples, however, crop up in the news all the time. There were several in the month of August. Here's one example:
Its second accounting error in as many quarters will result in a $3.4 million restatement at Symmetricom Inc. that will push its third quarter into the red....The company said that error was related to accounting for outsourced labor related to installation work and resulted from reliance on a manually compiled spreadsheet that was not accurately completed. [emphasis mine]
When we talk about spreadsheet-based processes being prone to expensive errors, we aren't necessarily talking about things like flaws in design or testing, that will affect virtually any system and are generally a function of budget and schedule, though those are of course substantial risks. What we think is potentially more dangerous is the fact that complex spreadsheet-based reporting processes almost always end up being boiled down to a lengthy series of steps an individual has to do on a weekly/monthly/quarterly basis. People are generally very good at establishing these processes and ensuring that they are correct, but they are not generally well-suited to repeating them flawlessly. It's just not the type of work most people are expert at, and given the nature of spreadsheets, it is generally very difficult to tell that anything has gone wrong.
We feel the best way to deal with these issues is to automate where possible, and then scrupulously check results, which is much easier with automation. Set up a system correctly once, then ensure that the system performs the same process to your data every time. If the system can produce the required output quickly and gives access to intermediate calculations, validity tests and sanity checks can be easily run.
We've made some pretty substantial changes to the website, so as usual, if you come across anything that looks odd, send us a note.
I'm on the plane now (after my five hour ground delay at Mineta) thinking about Mashup Camp and my main takeaway is that I'm still a big buyer of the Unconference format. It's even more striking given that the last conference I went to was Enterprise 2.0. It does seem to lead to higher-quality discussions and a general better use of time.
One of the most interesting demos at mashup camp was IBM's DAMIA.
This week, I'm headed out to Mashup Camp in beautiful Mountain View, CA (more accurately known as Hangar View). If you're going to be there, let me know.
Using the GoogleFinance function in a Google Spreadsheet, you can have automatically-updated financial data from Google finance in your spreadsheet.
Interesting article on Reg Braithwaite's blog about software development. Here's a quote:
Theory P adherents believe that software can only partially be designed in advance. They believe that requirements suffer from observation, that the act of building software causes the requirements to change.
“Spreadsheets … used improperly or incorrectly, or without sufficient control, pose a greater threat to your business than almost anything you can imagine.”
This is a little off-topic for this blog, but judging from the comments of Proto downloaders and users, a lot of you are interested in startups in general. Marc Andreessen (the Netscape+Loudcloud/Opsware+Ning guy) has been doing an incredible series of posts about startups on his blog. Here's the series so far, collected for your convenience:
