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Data caught in spreadsheets is kind of an instance of the general siloing of data. The situation is something of a general problem of a data-driven Society. On

Data caught in spreadsheets is kind of an instance of the general siloing of data. The situation is something of a general problem of a data-driven Society. One group of people want information available with one interface and spends resources only in putting it in a format suitable - to the detriment of others who/want need it. With spreadsheets in particular, naturally you have a data-integrity but that's still an instance of the broader problem.

themodelplumber 5y ago
It's a general psychological problem, too. A huge part of storage organization psychology, whether in software or in a physical room, is subjective/proprietary perception and judgment. People who prefer and naturally warp any job role or position to use these tools, as all humans do with subjectively preferred processes and perspectives, will never stop creating them. The good part of this not-invented-here mindset is that it's also how technology moves forward. "I need this new system to be mine/fit my way of organizing" is also often another way of creating a "this never existed before" product or outcome. These storage and organization tools and silos are born as subjective (context-fitting) design processes. So they tend to get locked up behind depth-oriented (subjective) processes, and eventually frozen by stabilizer groups. Stabilizer groups follow up to use the tools and promote the idea of keeping the data siloed the way it is. They don't like change at work because change breaks their preferred psychological processes, causes them to have to re-build their perceptual frameworks, and because they're humans, this makes them do stupid things at work, like lash out or become passive-aggressive or detonate their new diet plan or become late for a baseball game. They will blame all of this on "open data" or whatever it is that caused their stable workflow to destabilize. There are lots of solutions to this, and Excel by itself can be seen as an attempt at a solution to the problem...also the problem can be moderated by the system of energy surrounding the data valuation and access to the data. And "just don't silo stuff, guys" seems to be the proposal with the worst track record so far.
CJefferson 5y ago
So, what's your alternative? Spreadsheets have many advantages, they are easy to edit, copy around, and quickly filter and do simple calculations (like find how many students are in a class if size smaller than 10, for example). I can't think of a sensible alternative given current tools -- we should make better tools of course.
HPsquared 5y ago
In my use cases, the siloing is an advantage: the project I'm working on is contained in a couple of files in a folder somewhere that can be archived and opened/rerun with confidence years from now. Most other systems don't allow this level of encapsulation / archiving ability.

themodelplumber 5y ago

It's a general psychological problem, too. A huge part of storage organization psychology, whether in software or in a physical room, is subjective/proprietary perception and judgment. People who prefer and naturally warp any job role or position to use these tools, as all humans do with subjectively preferred processes and perspectives, will never stop creating them. The good part of this not-invented-here mindset is that it's also how technology moves forward. "I need this new system to be mine/fit my way of organizing" is also often another way of creating a "this never existed before" product or outcome. These storage and organization tools and silos are born as subjective (context-fitting) design processes. So they tend to get locked up behind depth-oriented (subjective) processes, and eventually frozen by stabilizer groups. Stabilizer groups follow up to use the tools and promote the idea of keeping the data siloed the way it is. They don't like change at work because change breaks their preferred psychological processes, causes them to have to re-build their perceptual frameworks, and because they're humans, this makes them do stupid things at work, like lash out or become passive-aggressive or detonate their new diet plan or become late for a baseball game. They will blame all of this on "open data" or whatever it is that caused their stable workflow to destabilize. There are lots of solutions to this, and Excel by itself can be seen as an attempt at a solution to the problem...also the problem can be moderated by the system of energy surrounding the data valuation and access to the data. And "just don't silo stuff, guys" seems to be the proposal with the worst track record so far.

CJefferson 5y ago

So, what's your alternative? Spreadsheets have many advantages, they are easy to edit, copy around, and quickly filter and do simple calculations (like find how many students are in a class if size smaller than 10, for example). I can't think of a sensible alternative given current tools -- we should make better tools of course.

HPsquared 5y ago

In my use cases, the siloing is an advantage: the project I'm working on is contained in a couple of files in a folder somewhere that can be archived and opened/rerun with confidence years from now. Most other systems don't allow this level of encapsulation / archiving ability.