Part of my role these days is trying to gather, analyse and present data to better manage our group and in turn provide greater value to the organisation.
This is often frustrating. There are certain data elements that I expected to already be in place – not just collected, but collated and correlated as well. The fact that these data relationships do not exist slows my deliverables down quite considerably. In fact, even after I created a set of data sheets to show the data I require from a range of reports, creating a view of the correlation and effectively providing a multi-point relationship table – I still do not have what I require. I still am stuck behind a set of walls based on swimlanes, licensing limitations or simply some arbitrary “need to know” delineation. After nearly two months, what it effectively means is that I have been unsuccessfully trying to gather the data I require.
Part of the frustration, of course, comes from the fact that I see the problems and that part of me that is a lifelong Solutions person is ready to charge in and discuss the issues, provide an analysis and then fix them.
But that is no longer my role. Nor, it seems, is it met with grace when offered.
So, instead, whilst I await the potential second coming of an anointed one to provide me with a custom report, I am playing around with trying to kludge together a data cube in excel with the Microsoft PowerPivot add-on and some fancy pancy lookup tables. So far it has eventuated in a steady migraine, a nervous twitch and what I think was a stress induced aneurysm.
This has been a Monday post.
An Alternative Working Title was : MS Excel, the enterprise tool you didn’t know you had!
xntrek 