The Spreadsheet Running Your Business

Somewhere in your company there is a spreadsheet doing the work of a system. It calculates the payroll, or schedules the shifts, or tracks the inventory, and it lives on one laptop owned by one person who understands the macros. Nobody chose this. It grew, one clever formula at a time, into load-bearing infrastructure that no diagram admits exists.

Shadow IT is not a moral failing. It is a symptom. People build the spreadsheet because the official tool was too slow, too locked down, or too absent to do the job in front of them. The workaround is feedback. It is telling you exactly where the sanctioned path failed.

The danger is that the spreadsheet has no backup, no access control, no test, and no successor. When its owner leaves, the knowledge leaves too. So go find these things — not to confiscate them, but to ask why they had to be invented, and to give the work a real home before the laptop it lives on does not come back from holiday.